


four weddings

by ont



Series: mockingbird [17]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Abortion, Alcoholism, Canon Compliant, Climate Change, Divorce, Drug Use, Las Vegas Wedding, M/M, Marital Issues, Marriage, Mental Illness, Miscarriage, Mpreg, Outdoor Sex, Pregnancy, Sibling Rivalry, Weddings, a lil corporate espionage, big family drama, child of divorce trauma, elopement, generational cycles, harry and louis trying very hard to be friends in a normal way, parenting, stepdad stuff, the music industry, typical band drama
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-18 08:27:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 192,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21941152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ont/pseuds/ont
Summary: Four stories that trace four of the most significant weddings in the boys’ lives, and the events surrounding each of them, over the course of 21 years. (sliding doors verse)
Relationships: Liam Payne/Louis Tomlinson, OC/OC, Zayn Malik/Harry Styles, Zayn Malik/Louis Tomlinson
Series: mockingbird [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/499807
Comments: 49
Kudos: 58





	1. liam and ceci

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow this series has cracked a million words uhhhhhhhhhhhh happy holidays everybody LOL

TUSCANY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2018

Niall arrives to the wedding reception pre-drinks before anyone he recognizes. The ceremony was one of those terribly long Catholic ones, with an Italian priest speaking in Latin and swinging a thurible around. This felt ludicrous, as Liam isn’t at all religious, and Niall is fairly certain Cecilia is a lapsed Catholic herself, but this is what she and her family wanted — that plus a big old prenup. Niall has been finding all this out in drips of gossip from Liam’s friends, who seem to be equally as worried about him as Niall is, but all act like they’re powerless to stop him from making what might be a huge mistake.

“Has anyone tried, you know, _talking_ to him?” Niall said to Andy when he ran into him at the hotel. Andy just shrugged and drank more free Dom Perignon.

The ceremony was in an ancient-looking cathedral in the center of the city, and they’d blocked off several streets for the hullabaloo of driving Ceci up to the entrance in a horse-drawn carriage. Niall was out front with the smokers when this went down — of course he doesn’t smoke, but he needed fresh air and a little conversation.

“God, that’s ridiculous,” the glum-looking guy next him muttered as they watched Ceci descend and begin to pose for a team of five photographers.

“How d’you know Liam?” Niall said to him, because he figured a friend of the bride wouldn’t be talking like that.

He snorted. “I barely do. The bride’s my sister.”

“Oh, shit,” Niall said. “Hey there. Niall.”

“Dick.” Dick smoked more. “Oh, you were in that boy band with him, right?”

“I _am_ in that boy band with him,” he said, feeling a bit like he was channeling Louis in absentia.

Once inside the reception hall — an ancient villa on the banks of the Arno River that’s creaking like it might fall in at any moment — Niall looks around for Dick or a single other familiar face, but there’s no one. Just little knots of people he doesn’t know chatting and drinking champagne, plus waiters and photographers walking around with walkie-talkies looking stressed out. He’s about to get his phone out and start texting just so he doesn’t look like Billy no mates, when someone claps their hand on his shoulder.

He turns and sees Harry, who winks at him. “Thank God,” he says, relieved. “Where’ve you been all day?”

Harry shakes his head. “Flight got delayed,” he says regretfully. “I missed the ceremony.”

“Lucky you. Why didn’t you fly in last night?”

“I had some business in Milan yesterday.”

“Yeah? What, buyin’ shoes?”

“Doing a shoot for _Vogue Italia.”_

Someone shouts across the room at them. They turn and see Liam, breaking away from some family members and waving at them as he approaches. He’s carrying his little daughter.

“Hey lad,” Niall calls to him.

“Hey, hey,” Liam says, beaming as he stops in front of them. Sunday looks around curiously with her big dark eyes, and Harry extends his arms; Liam hands her over.

“Sweet girl,” Harry coos to her. “Oh, you’re just precious, aren’t you? Yeah, you are...”

Liam watches them, still smiling, although there’s a little melancholy in his eyes now. He looks good: clean-shaven with his hair slicked back. He seems to be on the thin side lately.

“Glad you could join us, Harry,” he says with a wry smile.

“Hey, I’m here in time for the fun part, aren’t I?” Harry says, smiling back. “I’m so sorry, really. You know these Italian airlines, no one’s ever in a hurry.”

“Ah, no worries. Ceremony was mostly in Latin, anyway, you didn’t miss anything.”

Niall hesitates, then says, “Shame Louis couldn’t make it.”

The melancholy in Liam’s eyes is gone, suddenly. They’ve gone blank like he pulled a shade down inside himself.

“Uh, yeah,” he says. “Weird not to have him here.”

“Really weird,” Niall says.

He isn’t trying to prod, or bring up any difficult feelings. He just knows for a fact that Liam has never really dealt with his feelings for Louis, never had closure or moved on. It’s the same for Louis. And now it feels like they might just keep avoiding each other, that the band might stay fractured forever. Niall can’t let that happen, even if he means he has to be a little tactless for once.

“Was there somewhere else he had to be?” Harry says drily. It’s like he’s been programmed with a kill switch to be nasty every time he hears Louis’ name.

Liam exhales. “Uh. Yeah.”

“Really?” Harry says, as Sunday reaches up to tug at his hair. “And where would that be?”

“Let’s not do this,” Liam says, smiling tightly. “We know why he’s not here, alright? It’s no hard feelings, or anything. He sent us a nice gift. I saw them at the VMAs, I’m sure we’ll all get together at some point.”

This is such a bald-faced white lie that Liam stumbles over it a bit as it comes out, like the words are a mouthful of feathers.

“You think the song had anything to do with it?” Niall says.

Liam’s face steels. “I don’t want to talk about that on my wedding day,” he snaps, unusually testy.

“Sorry, I’m just, y’know. Trying to figure this out. You guys were so close.”

“I hardly talk to him anymore,” Liam says. “I haven’t seen him since that band meeting, alright?”

“I didn’t know that,” Niall says.

“Yeah, well.” He brings a hand to his ribs and winces.

“You good?” Niall says.

“Yeah, just got knocked around this morning. Was playing football with my groomsmen, couple other guys… _fútbol_ , rather,” Liam says, with a weak smile.

Niall nods. Liam’s groomsmen were somewhat of a surprise: half are guys he’s been friends with for ages, who Niall knows well, but the rest are blokes he’s only started hanging out with in the last year. (They look like rich assholes, those guys. They’re very smirky. That’s the kind of people Liam’s been around since he got with Ceci, is intense Broadway types and rich smirky assholes.) In total he had what looked like about a dozen, to match Ceci, who was surrounded by her own giggling phalanx of sleek-haired women in dusky pink dresses.

Liam had actually asked Niall if he wanted to be in the wedding party, but that didn’t feel right for a few reasons. He loves Liam like a brother, but he was never as close to him as either Zayn or Louis was at various points, and it just feels wrong to occupy that role when those two aren’t even attending. Plus, he didn’t want Ceci’s big day to get swallowed up in 1D chatter and press. She really seems to hate having the band brought up around her, so Niall figured he’d do Liam a solid there and just sidestep the issue entirely.

A few more stragglers wander in, then, clutching their wedding programs in their hands. A guy at the front waves to Liam, who nods back and says, “I’m gonna go say hi real quick — you two alright with the baby?”

“Yeah,” Harry assures him. “She’s no trouble.”

Sunday is in fact very quiet, though she whines a little when Liam walks away. Harry rubs her on the back.

Niall beckons for Harry to come join him by a window. He takes a little shrimp hors d'oeuvre from a waiter that offers them as he passes by, then whispers, “Does he seem happy to you?”

Harry looks at him like he’s confused. “Liam?”

“Yeah, Liam.”

“Happy enough,” Harry says, shrugging.

“Happy enough, huh?”

“What’s with you? You’ve got this, like... mania.” Harry makes a lazy gesture in the general direction of Niall’s face.

“What’s up is he’s just married this woman, and he still looks like _that_ when I say Louis’ name.”

Harry scoffs. “You’re being a drama queen,” he whispers, bouncing Sunday, who looks around with curious eyes but doesn’t land on anything in particular. “I know you’re like… convinced everyone’s in love with Louis, or something…”

“Two people,” Niall says. “Two people on the entire planet. Not quite everyone.”

“Right.”

“You’ve seen how the two of them look at each other. I know you have.”

“So you want to break up two marriages, then?”

“No, I just want ‘em both to be happy, that’s all!”

“Well,” Harry says, “he seems happy to me. I think maybe you’re looking for things where they aren’t just ‘cos you want things to be like they used to be, and that’s just not gonna happen.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean…” Harry gives a cursory glance around, then locks his eyes on Niall’s. “The band’s not getting back together. Alright? More than likely never the four of us, and a hundred percent never the five of us. So just let that fantasy go, mate. For everyone’s sake.”

Niall can’t deny that he’s hurt by this; his throat tightens up, and his chest twinges. He wants to lash out in kind, hit back that Harry’s just jealous and lonely and that being king of the world clearly isn’t all he thought it would be, that half the reason he’s gone so hard on his solo career is to crush Zayn into the dust for having the brutal audacity to marry Harry’s former best friend, have two kids with him, and then talk shit about Harry in the press.

But Niall has no fight in him, no real desire to hurt Harry back. He knows he’s hurting already.

“It’s Zayn’s fault,” he says. “That fuckin’ song. Made everythin’ so awkward.”

“Don’t say _fucking_ in front of the kid,” Harry whispers.

Sunday looks up at him curiously. “Me,” she says. “I’m kid.”

He pets her head. “You.”

“Sorry,” Niall says.

“Maybe it was a good thing, the song,” Harry adds blithely. “Got everything out in the open, yeah?”

“Hurt everyone unnecessarily, more like.”

“Seemed like Zayn was fairly hurt, himself.”

“He didn’t need to put all their business out there like that.”

“I know, but we all do it, Niall.”

Niall sighs. “It’s just, you know how Liam is. How am I not gonna worry about him?”

“Of course I know how Liam is,” Harry retorts. “He’s married some beautiful, controlling pain in the arse, and are they gonna be married forever? Probably not, no, but who is? So he learns a lesson and moves on, and hopefully their daughter’s not too fucked up in the process… I dunno why we all need to be having kids at twenty-three anyway, but that’s none of my business, is it? None of this is.”

“So this is just about your grudge against Louis, then,” Niall says, cutting his eyes around the room to make sure no one’s paying attention to them. No one is, thank God.

“Please,” Harry sighs. “I don’t have _grudges._ This is all so unlike you… what are you agitated over, exactly? Can we just enjoy the reception? I’m really jet lagged.”

Niall’s about to respond when behind them, a familiar female voice says, “Hi!”

He turns. It’s Cecilia. She has a haughty, regal bearing to her, like a Russian princess, and she’s undeniably gorgeous in a movie star way, especially as a bride. Niall can easily imagine Liam being drawn in by her charm, especially in as vulnerable a state as he was in when they met.

“Hey hey,” he says, with a polite smile.

“Hi, good to see you guys,” she says. “Actually, Harry, have we officially met?”

Harry is standing there with his arms comically rigid, like he’s expecting her to take Sunday back, but she doesn't acknowledge her daughter. “Uh,” he says. “Yeah. We met at the Tonys.”

“Ri-ight,” Ceci says. She seems to be aware she’s walked into some kind of awkward energy. “Anyway, I was going to ask, have you seen Liam?”

Niall nods and points at Liam’s back over by the doorway. “Saying hi to folks.”

“Okay, thanks,” she says, hitching up her dress. “We need to do more couple photos while the sun’s going down…” She laughs. “It never ends! Just a big party you can’t enjoy.”

“Right,” Niall says. “I mean, I’ve never been married, but I’ve heard, y’know... that.”

“Congratulations, by the way,” Harry says.

“Oh, yeah, congratulations!” Niall says. “Sorry, Christ. Complete rube, me. It’s a beautiful wedding.”

“Thanks so much,” Ceci says, falsely cheery. “Isn’t it gorgeous? I love Italy, I’ve always thought it was so romantic. I mean, I’m part Italian. And Liam actually proposed on the Arno! He’s so good at knowing exactly what I want.”

“Right,” Niall says. “Yeah, he’s good like that.”

“Anyway, I’ll see you two around,” she says, then waves at Sunday. “Bye honey!”

“Mommy,” Sunday cries out, reaching for her, but Ceci turns on her heel and heads off without seeming to register it, her long train sweeping behind her.

Harry looks sympathetically down at Sunday. “I guess you’re _my_ baby, now?” he says. “I’ve been assigned custody of this baby?”

“Yeah,” Sunday chirps.

“Yeah?” Harry murmurs, tickling her and making her giggle.

“I’m sure Liam’s mum would take her, if you want to go find her,” Niall says.

“No, it’s alright. You know I like babies.” Harry bounces her, and she giggles more. “Don’t I, yeah, don’t I? You poor little thing.”

“God, this is all just depressing the hell out o’ me now,” Niall mutters.

“Well, we get to have a nice dinner, and good champagne,” Harry says. “Hear some good music, see some friends we haven’t seen in a while.”

He’s right — more guests are filing in, now, and for the first time all cocktail hour, it’s people Niall actually knows.

“Yeah,” Niall says.

They’re quiet for a moment.

“If you’d seen him at the ceremony,” Niall says, turning back to Harry, who gazes back at him with those limpid eyes. “If you’d been there… I dunno. I just feel like he’s moving so fast. I don’t think he’d move this fast if it was the right thing, y’know?”

“There’s a baby involved,” Harry murmurs. “Maybe it’s good that they’ve done this. You know Liam’ll do everything he can to make things work out. And they do seem happy.”

Niall looks over his shoulder, where Liam and Ceci are standing near the door with their arms around each other’s waists and grins on their faces, trying to corral their wedding party.

“Yeah,” he says. “Guess so.”

LOS ANGELES, SEPTEMBER 20, 2018

Louis is in the kitchen getting a beer when he gets a push notification for a Twitter Moment.

**Pop star Liam Payne has wed actress Cecilia Marino in a Tuscany ceremony attended by dozens of their fellow celebrities.**

He’d known that was today. This morning he’d sent Liam an (as yet unopened and unanswered) text saying _Congrats mate :) Have a great day. Big love._

It killed him to do that, made him heartsick and twisty in his guts. But he had to — he wants to be friends again, eventually, if they can get there. He can’t ignore Liam on his wedding day.

Louis is heartsick all over again, seeing the alert. A familiar nausea stirs in his throat. He takes a long drink of his beer, then heads out of the kitchen and down the hall to the sitting room.

Zayn is napping on the couch with Mia, who’s fast asleep in the crook of his arm. Louis smiles at them as he climbs down into the conversation pit. Mia’s been sweetly clingy with Zayn, lately, always wanting him over Louis; Louis is a tiny bit hurt by this, but mostly relieved to be benched. If she were still being clingy with him right now, when Amir is a little koala on his back all the time, he’d never get a moment alone. He might truly lose the plot.

He picks up the remote and mutes the TV ( _Peppa Pig_ was on) then goes to Amir’s playpen and peeks in on him. He’s playing in happy silence with his Hot Wheels.

“Hi baby,” Louis whispers.

“Daddy,” Amir chirps, looking up at him.

“You wanna hang out with me?”

He reaches up for Louis, who scoops him up and staggers back to the couch with him, settling down with a groan. Next to him, Zayn stirs, but doesn’t wake.

Louis cradles Amir’s warm weight against his chest. He’s a perfect age, lovey and smiley and just on the fringes of becoming a person. He’s always pointing to things, now, and watching his parents intently, trying to imitate them when they play video games or instruments or talk on the phone.

“Who’s my sweet boy,” Louis coos to him, stroking his dark-haired head. “Is it you?”

“Yeah,” Amir says sleepily.

Louis cuddles him closer, kissing him on the head. It’s alright to let Liam go for good, he tells himself. It wasn’t meant to be. Liam’s got a lovely wife and a little girl, and he’s got these two wonderful kids who he loves, and Zayn.

Amir is dozing off in his arms, his hand fisted in Louis’ shirt. Something about him always makes Louis’ heart ache; somehow, he’s more acutely aware of the fleeting nature of childhood when it comes to Amir than he ever has been with Mia. Louis isn’t afraid of Mia growing up. He has a suspicion that she’ll always be his pal, and he thinks it’ll be a relief to deal with a headstrong adult versus a headstrong kid. But Amir — as clingy and lovey as he is now, Louis is scared he’ll grow up and away from him. He isn’t sure why.

Maybe it’s because of how much he looks like Zayn, which isn’t fair to Amir at all. He’s such a wee little boy, still, barely even forming two-word sentences. He cries at everything and is always reaching for his parents, always desperate to be cuddled and comforted. Thinking about this just makes Louis’ heart hurt even worse. He kisses Amir on the head again, then strokes his soft black hair. “Hey,” he says aloud.

Zayn stirs, his catlike eyes opening a crack. “Mmn.”

“Amir’s about to nap, I think,” he murmurs. “D’you wanna, like…”

Zayn’s eyes spring open. “Yeah?”

“Well, I dunno if Mims is gonna stay asleep, but we can give it a try,” he offers.

They haven’t had much time for sex lately — they’ve both been exhausted from the kids and from work, and Zayn’s planning this fucking tour, now, which they’ve been rowing passive-aggressively about. Louis still can’t even believe he’s doing it, that he’s just going to leave the three of them behind at home and jet off, when he doesn’t even _like_ touring. If anyone should be going on tour, it’s Louis. But he can’t. His album didn’t sell well enough to justify it, not when he could barely promote it, not when he’s got two little kids at home. Amir doesn’t even like it when he leaves for the evening to hang out with his mates, how would he stand his beloved dad being away for months at a time?

Plus, he hates to admit it to himself, but he can’t leave Zayn alone with the kids. He’s been too troubled lately, with the heavy drinking and the Xanax and the crushing anxiety. If Louis went on tour, he knows something would go wrong while he was gone, and he’d blame himself.

Zayn tucks the still-sleeping Mia into her little bed, and Louis settles Amir down in the crib across from her. At first he protests, “No, no,” but then his eyes are falling shut again, and his little limbs are going limp.

“C’mon,” Zayn says, sounding a little impatient. “‘E’s good.”

“No, I can’t leave him ‘til he’s properly asleep,” Louis whispers, watching Amir’s chest rise and fall, waiting for the rhythm of it to slow slightly. He strokes his hair to keep him soothed. “He wakes back up and cries if I’ve left him, you know that...”

Zayn sighs. “I know.”

Louis waits a minute or two more, until Amir looks to be truly down for the count, then strokes his head one more time and shuts the light as they sneak back out of the nursery.

Zayn’s all over him the second they’re alone in the hallway, groping his willy in his sweatpants and biting at his neck. Louis lets him go for it. He’s got these swells of abandonment cresting in his chest and lurching up into his throat; he wants to grab Zayn by the collar and beg him not to tour, beg him not to leave him here all alone with nothing to do but take care of the kids all day. That wouldn’t be fair, though. Everyone’s saying Zayn needs to do this for his career, and maybe he does. One of them ought to be a success.

They fall into their bed together and Louis shimmies his joggers down, flinging them aside so he can spread his legs. Zayn lubes himself up and slides in; Louis is willing and waiting, already hard himself. Zayn feels good, he always does — there’s something undeniable about their chemistry. Even when he’s furious with him or they’re not getting on, he still just wants him, his body wants Zayn’s body. He doesn’t have to think or feel, if he doesn’t want to. Today he doesn’t want to.

Louis sits up with him and switches their position so he’s bouncing in Zayn’s lap, gripping the headboard with one hand and staring at Zayn’s lovely face as he rides his cock. Zayn grips his waist hard. His lips are parted, lids low.

“Hey scruffy,” Zayn mumbles.

Louis shifts on him, getting him in deeper. Zayn groans softly and drops one hand to his bum, squeezing a handful.

He buries his face in Zayn’s neck, rocking his hips up in time with him, letting his cock pound as deep as it can. Zayn smells nice, sort of fruity and spicy. It’s probably that product he uses on his beard to make it softer.

“I want you to eat my arse,” he whispers to him.

Zayn kisses the side of his head. “Yeah, lemme come first.”

“You wanna eat your come out of me?”

“I’ll come on your stomach.”

Louis doesn’t protest this; he’s in the mood to be bossed and manhandled. Zayn lays them down on their sides together, nestled in pillows, and Louis tosses his leg over Zayn’s so he can stay in deep. Zayn grabs his arse in two handfuls, dragging him in closer, fucking him harder. He’s really pounding on Louis’ sweet spot right now, and Louis is moaning, his eyes rolling back as pleasure thuds in every vein.

“I love you,” Zayn murmurs to him, kissing his neck.

“Love you too,” Louis breathes. He’s feeling a primal, pulsing affection for his husband; it’s in these moments where he thinks it might be alright if Zayn got him pregnant again. It’s just some funny hormonal thing. He’d never mention it, because Zayn would take him seriously and either freak out or agree, and he’s not sure which would be worse.

It’s just that Zayn seemed so settled and at ease when he was pregnant with Amir, and now he’s off-kilter again, and Louis can’t figure out how to bring him back to Earth. A tour seems like the opposite of what he needs right now, but what is Louis supposed to do? They’ve already had so many fights over it. Zayn’s made it clear he isn’t going to change his mind, even though he doesn’t seem to actually want to do this.

The dark part of Louis suspects that the tour is a way for Zayn to escape his daily responsibilities here at home. Yeah, he’ll have to perform, but he won’t have to deal with potty training and Mia’s tantrums and doing the avoiding-paparazzi mambo every time they want to take the kids to the park in relative privacy. He’ll be able to drink as much as he wants and do Xanax all day long, out from under the watchful eye of his husband.

Zayn reaches up to stroke Louis’ cheek, swiping the pad of his thumb along his cheekbone. “Pretty,” he murmurs, kissing him.

“You feel good,” Louis deflects.

Zayn fucks him harder for a while, just long enough to get him really aroused, then pulls out and comes on his stomach as promised. Louis wipes it off with his shirt and lies there sort of annoyed until Zayn flips him over and starts licking his arsehole and stroking his hard cock between his legs.

“Ohh,” Louis sighs happily. “Good boy, yeah.”

Zayn can be a bit selfish in bed, but he’s a champion arse-eater. He edges him for ages — by the time Louis is finally allowed to come, he’s been writhing and begging for mercy for ages beforehand. His orgasm is a profound relief that spreads through his body like honey. He sags into the bedspread, groaning softly, hot semen trickling down his leg.

Zayn kisses up the sensitive skin of his thigh and over his bum, then his lower back and his shoulder blades. “Hi baby.”

“Hi,” Louis murmurs.

Zayn collapses atop him, kissing the back of his neck and ruffling his hair. On the bedside table, Louis’ phone dings with a text.

Louis feels Zayn lean over him for it — his _No!_ dies in his throat when he realizes how suspicious that would sound, but he has a gut feeling the text is from Liam.

This is confirmed when Zayn clears his throat and says, “Liam says thanks and that they loved the gift.”

“Oh,” Louis mutters, his heart pounding in his chest. His post-orgasm high is gone as quick as it came. “Okay. Good.”

“He got married today, yeah?”

“Yeah. Today.”

Zayn sets Louis’ phone back down with a hard clunk. “What’d you get them?”

“I, ah, opened a performing arts scholarship in their name, for low-income English kids.”

“Nice idea,” Zayn says quietly.

“Said it was from both of us.”

“Did you.”

“It’s just good manners. Married people are meant to give joint gifts.”

It’s still surreal to him that he’s married to Zayn — that he’s married at all, at twenty-six, with two kids. And Zayn’s only twenty-five.

“Don’t recall Liam buying us a gift for our wedding,” Zayn says coolly.

“Yeah, ‘cos you would’ve killed him if he had.” Louis thinks, but doesn’t say, that Liam sent gifts for both the kids before they were born — that beautiful mobile for Mia, and a giant stuffed giraffe for Amir. He doesn’t think it would be smart to remind Zayn of this right now.

Zayn rolls off of him and leaves him lying there in the wet spot. Louis feels a pang of loneliness that he stuffs back down. He’s got that fucking baby shark song stuck in his head again, too, now. The quotidian despair of parenting engulfs him.

“You two text often?” Zayn says suspiciously.

Louis finally rolls over and looks up at him, incredulous. “No,” he says. “Once in a while, alright? Something friendly. You’re welcome to go through me phone if you like.”

He genuinely does want to make Zayn feel better, and this seems like the quickest route to it. Louis asked to look through Zayn’s phone himself, last year, when he was hormonal and insecure. Plus, Zayn was in a postnatal anxiety spiral then, and hard to talk to, even though he was being just as physically affectionate as usual.

Zayn had just grunted and tossed his unlocked phone to him, with the flat-mouthed, resentful expression of the eternally untrusted.

It did make Louis feel better, to see proof of Zayn ignoring endless Instagram DMs of naked selfies from incredibly hot people, and no suspicious texts, except Zayn demurring some obvious flirting from a DJ friend of his with “aha :)” instead of “Remember, mate, I’m married with two small children.” Yeah, he had some jerkoff material banked on his camera roll, but so does Louis.

There isn’t anything suspect on Louis’ phone, he knows. Friendly texts with Liam; a few friendly texts with Eleanor, who had reached out to wish him well after Amir was born. No genuine flirting with anyone. And he ignores the nudes in his DMs, too. But what Zayn’s scared of is emotional infidelity — he probably wouldn’t even care if Louis were soliciting nudes or sending dirty texts, as long as he’s not connecting with anybody else the way he’s supposed to connect with Zayn, or spilling their marital secrets, or complaining about him.

And he’s not. He doesn’t even mention Zayn when he talks to Liam. They just talk about their kids and exchange Spotify links to songs they think the other would like.

Louis gestures to his phone in offering. Zayn stares him down, but seems to accept that he’s telling the truth, and doesn’t reach for it.

“She seems alright,” he offers. “His wife.”

“You saw her for two seconds at the VMAs,” Louis reminds him. “The only thing you know about her is she’s fit.”

He laughs. “Alright, she seems fit then.”

Louis makes a noncommittal noise.

“Jealous?” Zayn says, eyes glimmering.

His heart skips a beat. “No. Just want Liam to be happy, that’s all.”

“I’m sure he’s very happy with wossername,” Zayn says dismissively. “Want to shower with me? You’re cummy.”

“Whose fault is that?”

Zayn leans in and presses a hard kiss to his mouth, sucking at his bottom lip. Their teeth click together.

“You go shower,” Louis murmurs when they separate. “I’ll be in in a bit.”

“Okay,” Zayn says, flicking his gaze up and down Louis’ face. “Whatever.”

He pats Louis on the thigh and leaves him, slinking into the bathroom and pulling the door closed shut behind him.

Louis rolls over on his side, burying himself in the comforter, and opens Twitter back up. He searches “liam payne” and hits the Photos tab, then starts scrolling through the grainy iPhone pictures that guests had sneaked from inside the church or taken at the reception.

His heart drops hard when he sees one that isn’t grainy. It’s a perfectly clear shot of the two of them at dinner, smiling as someone toasts them, with Liam’s arm around Ceci and her hand on his thigh. They look so beautiful together. Louis feels small.

He wants to text Niall and ask how it’s going, but he doesn’t want to give himself up that way. It would be so pathetic.

Instead, Louis clears his Twitter search history and tosses his phone facedown on the bed, heading into the bathroom. He ignores his naked reflection in the mirror as he goes by the big mirror; he doesn’t want to catch an eyeful of the faded white stretch marks on his hips, not right now.

Zayn always claims he doesn’t even notice them anymore, they’ve gotten so faint, but Louis thinks he’s lying. They got papped shirtless when they took the kids to the beach last month, and he felt like every caption in the _Daily Mail_ was snidely mocking him. _Dad of two Louis Tomlinson shows off his beach body as he carries a boogie board down to the surf_. ‘Beach body,’ yeah — fuck you too, the _Mail._ Shitheads.

They got him at Heathrow just a month after he gave birth to Amir, when he and Zayn took the babies to England for a family visit, and pulled the same bullshit then too. _Louis shows off his figure after welcoming baby number two_. He wanted to yell that he wasn’t showing off anything, in fact he rather preferred no one look at him, and where the fuck do they get off pretending like they’re not the ones publishing pap shots of him in a private moment? You couldn’t tell what Louis’ _figure_ looked like, anyway, since he was in baggy black sweats from head to toe. They could probably tell he was trying to hide, and so the captions seemed more designed to obliquely humiliate him for existing, for having the audacity to appear in public with his children after breaking up One Direction with his pregnancy. Even though he didn’t. Even though the hiatus was always Harry’s idea. Even though.

But this is how everyone in England thinks of him now, and sympathy for Little Mix runs high there right now as well, so Louis and Zayn are essentially pariahs in their own country. And as vicious as the writers have gotten, the paps are just as bad, with that specific nastiness of theirs — mechanical and mindlessly bloodthirsty, like a pack of sharks. Jumping in their faces, shouting at them in droning voices, trying to elbow their way past security.

Louis doesn’t mind the chaos when it’s fans reaching out in love, like they just want to lay a hand on him as he goes by to make sure he’s real. But the nightmare mirror image of that is paps jumping out from behind the bins and screaming at him, when he has Amir in his arms and little Mia is toddling alongside him holding his hand. Louis usually ends up pleading with them, though with enough bass in his voice that no one could mistake where he’s from or what he might do if his protective instincts are seriously provoked. “Please let me alone, I’ve got me kids, please don’t do this shit.” In those moments, he understands why Zayn barely wants to leave the house some days.

The glass walls around their rainfall shower are already fogged up. Louis gently eases the door open, stepping inside.

Zayn is turned away, soaping himself up all over, his chain shining on his neck. He glances over his shoulder when he hears Louis, then chin nods at him. Louis goes over to him, wrapping his arms around him.

“Hey,” Zayn says, laughing. He turns around, shaking his soaked black hair away from his face, and pulls Louis into a soapy embrace.

Louis nuzzles into his neck. “Hi,” he says loudly, over the water.

Zayn rubs a bar of that Cle De Peau soap he loves onto his hands, then starts rubbing them over Louis’ body, starting to work the layer of sticky come off of his stomach before reaching around to cheekily squeeze his arse.

“Ow,” Louis complains.

“What?”

“You beard burned me. My bum’s got beard burn.”

“Does it? That’s sexy.”

“That on top of you fucking me, I’m not gonna be able to sit down the rest of the day.”

“You don’t need to sit down, baby.”

Louis laughs. “I don’t?”

Zayn nuzzles him. “I’ll carry you everywhere.”

“Will you, then?”

Zayn presses a tender kiss to his temple. “We’ll do piggy-back rides,” he says huskily.

They snog for a minute or two in the hot, misty air. Louis is hungry for him, hungry for affection from him. He aches with the intensity of this, almost like it’s real physical hunger, with stomach pangs and everything.

“You love me?” Louis murmurs in his ear when they separate for air.

Zayn laughs. “Yeah, dumbfuck,” he says, kissing Louis wetly on the jaw. “I love you.”

“Good…” Louis nuzzles his nose against Zayn’s. “‘Cos I really love you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah! C’mon…”

Zayn kisses him on the mouth this time, pushing his tongue in, wrapping his arms around his waist and pulling him in tight. Louis sags in his grip, wanting only to be kissed and petted, and maybe to get his dick played with. Whatever they can get away with before the babies wake up.

He likes Zayn like this: too close to look at, so close he can only be felt. His beauty feels threatening sometimes. Louis’ nan always said you should never trust a beautiful alpha man, because they get too much too easily, with no consequences — the world is theirs on a string. But Louis feels like Zayn struggles too much for that to be true. If he does have the world on a string, he doesn’t seem to know what to do with it.

Not necessarily the kind of man you want for your baby father, his nan was quick to point out after he got pregnant with Mia, but Louis thinks that isn’t quite fair. He still sees glimpses of the boy Zayn used to be, and Zayn loves him, maybe just enough to dampen the roar of the public in their ears. Besides, he makes such beautiful, charming babies. How was a young man who was feeling a bit adrift, bit lonely, bit plain and overlooked, supposed to say no to this beautiful man and his gift of purpose-giving babies? At the time, Louis couldn’t even sit still long enough to figure out what _no_ would look like. The moment the band was ripped away from him and he was left pregnant and alone, he needed to jump into something, anything, with both feet.

“I wish you weren’t going on tour,” Louis admits, drawing back from Zayn’s passionate snogging.

Zayn draws his fingertips up Louis’ back in a slow, luxurious way that feels really good and makes chills run down his spine. “I’ve got to, though,” he says, the _o_ sound syrupy thick in his mouth.

“Do you?”

Zayn’s face doesn’t change. He shrugs.

Louis is struck by an urge so strong it snatches his breath — the urge to say, _If you really love me, you won’t go. You won’t leave me and the kids here alone._ But he can’t do that.

He leans back in for more kissing, instead.

TUSCANY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2018

Just after midnight, the entire thing has already devolved into a drunken mess. Liam and Ceci split off from each other after the matrimonial rituals and are each getting blasted with their groomsmen and bridesmaids, respectively, in the massive stone wine cellar of the villa that the reception afterparty has moved to.

Niall hangs out in the corner. He’s being far less of an extrovert than usual — he didn’t even volunteer for the terrible karaoke that’s currently going on across the room from him. He keeps refilling his wine glass until he’s nearly asleep on his feet, and making polite small talk with anyone who crosses his path. More than anything he wants to go back to his hotel room and fall into a dreamless sleep.

He finds Nick at a small table tucked away in the corner, killing a bottle of Merlot. He sits down next to him.

“Oh, you look so blue, Horan,” Nick says. He doesn’t even sound that drunk. “What’s wrong?”

“‘S’all wrong,” Niall says morosely. The room is spinning. “All wrong.”

“Weddings are awful,” Nick says, nodding. “Don’t know why I go to every single one I’m invited to.”

“No, normally they’re good…” Niall inhales. “This one isn’t.”

Nick is eyeing him curiously. “No?”

“She’s no’ right for him,” Niall slurs. “‘S’wrong.”

“Ahh.”

“You don’t get it.” Niall squeezes his eyes shut and rubs his forehead. “You don’t.”

“Where’s _your_ girlfriend, Niall?” Nick says cannily, pushing a glass of water across the table at him.

“‘M single right now. Again.” He takes a sip. He knows he must be pretty drunk, because the water tastes like air and he’s slopping it all down his front.

“Yeah?” Nick says sympathetically. “Lost another one? You’re really blowing through ‘em at this point.”

“Well, fffffuck you, for the record… ‘s’not about me, though.”

“No, of course not.”

Niall stares at the table, lacing his hands together in an attempt to steady himself. “Should be Louis he’s marrying.”

“Louis is married,” Nick points out.

“Neither of ‘em are happy. Everyone’s unhappy.”

“Zayn and Louis aren’t happy?” Nick says. “That’s news to me. Just came on my show this January and mooned to me about how in love they were, how their whole life’s rainbows and butterflies and babies.”

“Tha’ was just PR, Nick, don’t be a dick...”

“I’m not the dick, here,” Nick says. “If they’re not happy, they shouldn’t have two kids together, shouldn’t be together.”

“‘S’my fault.”

Nick tilts his head. “How’s it your fault?”

“I could’ve stopped it,” Niall says, blinking blearily. “Could’ve… I should’ve said somethin’...”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“I dunno. Should’ve kept the band together. Everyone’s so angry at each other now, it’s awful…”

“Drink more water,” Nick says, gentle but firm. “I don’t think that’s any of your fault, mate. I think your bandmates are a bit stubborn and childish, if I’m perfectly honest. Yes, including my dear friend Harold. And you’re all too young to be getting married and having children, but oh well.”

Niall sags back in his chair, these words swirling around his head but not penetrating. Someone is walking up to him. He blinks and blinks, until they form in his eyesight: Liam.

“Hey,” Liam says loudly over the music, bending down. “You alright?”

“I’m good,” Niall says.

Liam heaves him to his feet, and he staggers; Liam catches him, holding him upright and smiling at him. “Don’t take a tumble, hey?”

“Liam,” Niall says mushily. “I’m sorry.”

Liam’s brow knits. “Sorry?”

“‘M sorry you’re sad.”

His eyes crinkle and almost vanish as he smiles big. Niall’s so fucked up, he can’t tell if the smile is real or not. “I’m not sad, my lad! I’m happy. Happy day. Having a great time. Why don’t you come do some karaoke? I’ve got Harry over there, we’ll do a little reunion concert.”

Niall wants so badly to believe him. He lets Liam drag him through the crowd over to the other side of the room, but he casts one backward glance at Nick as they go. Nick shrugs at him as if to say, _what are you gonna do?_


	2. louis and liam

OAHU, HAWAII, JULY 10, 2026

After Louis and Liam’s rehearsal dinner, the hotel lounge is a scene of chaotic mingling. Mia loves it — she spends hours downstairs with all of her dad’s friends and family fussing drunkenly over her, exclaiming about how big she’s gotten and how cute she is. Amir gets fussed over, too, maybe even more than she does, but he doesn’t like it as much. He never has. Not like Mia, who zips around the room looking for opportunities to show off and command attention.

Sunday stayed upstairs to hang out with her grandma, who’s minding the twins. She’s probably happily snuggled in bed away from everyone, watching a Disney movie. It’s cozy inside the walls of the hotel — a summer storm is lashing the island, and outside is nothing but lush, rainy forest against the black, black sky.

Louis is very distracted being a good host to all these people he’s made fly out here, but every time Mia sidles up to him, he seems delighted by her presence. At one point he kneels next to her, fairly drunk, and wraps her up in his arms.

“I’m getting ma-arried,” he sings, swaying back and forth with her.

He sounds so happy about it. Mia’s happy because he is, but she’s a little sad too. It’s hard for her to remember her parents being in love. She doesn’t, really.

She really likes Liam, though, and Louis obviously loves him so much. There’s an ease to him when he’s with Liam that he never really has with anyone else. Her aunt Lottie said she thinks they’re soulmates because of everything they’ve gone through to be together, and Mia wasn’t really sure what that meant, but that’s the kind of thing adults would know about, right?

It’s nice. Her brothers will get to have married, happy parents, even if she and Amir don’t. And all she wants is for Louis to be taken care of.

“Congratulations, Dad,” she says, because all the adults keep saying that to him, and it makes him smile when they do.

“Aww, Mims.” Louis squeezes her and cradles her head. “I’m proper happy you kids are here. Especially you… you’re my little buddy.”

She likes that; it makes her feel special.

*

Liam escorts her and Amir up to their room before it gets too late. One of his sisters (Mia can’t tell them apart) remarks they should be well-rested for tomorrow so they aren’t cranky, then Amir exclaims, “I don’t get _cranky,”_ with such vehemence that it has the opposite effect as intended, and they get sent to bed.

Mia doesn’t mind. She’s tired, and it had gotten to the point where everyone was way too drunk to fuss over her anymore. All they wanted to do was laugh like hyenas and loudly tell the same old stories over and over, and every time someone started to tell a really dirty or embarrassing one in earshot of her, she got shooed away.

“Kids,” Liam says when he stops in the hallways outside the door to their room, fishing in his pockets for the keycard. “Before I go fetch Sunday, could I come in and talk to you two for a mo? It’ll be quick, I promise.”

Mia and Amir exchange a glance. It’s unusual for Liam to talk to them like this, all serious. He only gets serious with them when he’s mad, and when he’s mad, it’s funny, because he looks like a giant Muppet. He doesn’t look like a giant Muppet now.

“Okay,” Mia says, speaking for them both.

Liam follows them in and walks around, flicking lights on and checking the fridge. Mia hops onto her twin bed, legs splayed out in front of her, and Amir snuggles up next to her like he’s worried. Liam comes over and takes a seat at the edge, the little mattress squishing under his adult man weight.

He looks up at them, then, and clasps his hands together. “Excited for tomorrow?”

“Amir thinks he’s gonna trip when he brings you the rings,” Mia says.

“I do not!” Amir exclaims. “I just asked what would happen if I did!”

“Everyone’ll laugh at you so hard that they have to cancel the wedding, that’s what would happen.”

He shoves her. “Shut up.”

“Don’t hit me,” Mia threatens, raising a fist at him.

“Guys,” Liam says, putting a hand up. “Hey, hey.”

“Sorry,” they chorus.

Liam clears his throat. “I just wanted to say, y’know… I know me and your dad have been together a while now, and we’ve got the twins now too, but I wanted to tell you that I’m really happy to become your stepdad for real, and I love you both. And if either of you’ve got questions for me, or anything that’s bugging you or whatever, I’d like to take this time to talk about that.”

Mia glances over at Amir again. He looks back at her, his brow knit, and shrugs.

“Do we call you anything different now?” she says, turning back to Liam. “‘Cos we don’t want to.”

“Ah, no,” Liam says. “You just keep calling me Liam, that’s quite alright.”

“Do you and our other dad hate each other?” Amir blurts out.

Mia’s eyes widen; she carefully watches Liam’s face for a reaction, but it goes blank, his eyes dimming and his lips pressing together in a thin line.

“No,” Liam says. “Absolutely not… Zayn and I are old friends, we get along just fine. We all just want what’s best for you kids.”

“Why weren’t Dad and Harry at the rehearsal dinner, and the party tonight, and things?” Mia says.

“They’re busy people,” he says. “They’ll be at the ceremony.”

“D’you think they’re gonna get married too?” Amir says.

“I have no idea, honestly,” Liam says. “I suppose they might, at some point.”

“Can I ask something kind of rude?” Mia says.

“Sure.”

“Why didn’t you guys get married before you had the twins?”

He laughs, then. “Just sort of how things worked out.”

“But you were the ones who worked them out,” Mia says.

“Ah, look… planning a wedding takes time, it’s a big pain in your arse, ‘specially when it’s people like me and Louis who’ve got a bunch of other responsibilities and work obligations.” Liam shrugs. “We didn’t want there to be too big a gap in age with you lot and any sibling we gave you, so we just went ahead. ‘Course we’d both been married before, so it just wasn’t as big a deal to us. I promise I always intended to marry your dad, anyway.”

“Okay,” Mia says, satisfied with these answers. Next to her, Amir flops down on the bed yawning. “Are the holidays gonna be different?”

Liam shakes his head. “Not if you don’t want them to be.”

“We won’t do them in America now?”

“No, no. Still doing hols in England, and we’ll still go home to England throughout the year, same way we do now.”

“It’s just our family’s got so many people now,” Mia says. “It’s sort of annoying to go on planes with so many people.”

“It won’t be when the twins get older,” Liam says. “It just sucks now ‘cos they’re wee.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Mia says.

“Anything else?”

Mia sits there for a moment, thinking. Liam is looking at her, his face kind but apprehensive.

“We’re not gonna see our other dad less now, right?” she says.

Amir looks up, like he wants to hear the answer.

“No,” Liam says. “No reason you would. Nothing’s going to change with custody at all.”

“What would happen if you guys get a divorce?” Mia challenges.

“We won’t,” Liam says quickly, “but our first priority would be you kids, and making sure you’re alright.”

“Okay,” Mia says again. She’s getting bored of this conversation; Liam’s not going to tell them anything juicy, and he’s just going to keep insisting that nothing bad will ever happen again, which is the party line from all of the adults in her life.

“I want to tell you,” Liam says, “that you’ve been very lucky with how your dads handled splitting up. Most people, um… it’s not that easy for them to agree on things after they’ve divorced, and always do what’s right for the kids, and still have enough love for each other that they can be friends and be kind to one another. Not everyone would come to their ex-husband’s wedding.”

“I know,” Mia says in a quiet voice.

“That’s nice, but I’d trade it for parents who were still married,” Amir says from beside her, lounging indolently on the bed, his eyes glowing with a catlike fierceness.

“Amir,” Mia chides him.

“I do understand that,” Liam says. He heaves a long sigh, clasps his hands in his lap and gnaws at his lip for a moment. “Listen, I just want you both to know, no matter what happens, I’m gonna be here for you. I know how painful a divorce can be for the kids, and that it might be hard to trust that your dad and I will stay together. I promise, though, that I will stand by him and be there for him always, even if the worst case scenario should happen and we aren’t together anymore. And I will always be here for you two as well, anything you need from me. I want to be a really steady figure in your lives.”

Mia actually likes hearing this, even though she suspects that if Liam and her dad broke up, she would probably be the one comforting Amir and Louis about it. She can’t imagine Liam leaving her dad, though, which is a nice feeling. He’s always staring at him with this moony-eyed look, and touching him, and trying to make him laugh. One time when Louis was away in England for a week, she even caught Liam smelling one of his shirts before he put it in the laundry. Not like an ‘is this dirty’ smell, but a real, deep sniff. That has to be a grown-up thing, liking somebody that much, because it makes no sense to her.

“You’re not our dad, though,” Amir mutters impudently. He’s been having a hard time with the wedding all week. Mia knows he’s torn between having affectionate feelings toward Liam, and fearing that he’s betraying Zayn in doing so. She keeps telling him it’s fine, it’s not against the law to like your stepdad.

“I know,” Liam assures him. “I know. I’m not saying — I’m not trying to impose anything —”

“We know you aren’t,” Mia interrupts. “He’s being stupid. Don’t listen to him.”

Amir pinches her on the leg, and she pinches him back.

“Well,” Liam says, looking relieved. “Good.”

“Amir needs to sleep,” she says. “He’s cranky.”

“I am not!”

“No, she’s right,” Liam says. “You both need sleep. Big day tomorrow. So I’m just going to, um. I’ll fetch Sunday and you can all go to bed.”

He gets to his feet and straightens sort of awkwardly, wriggling in the suit jacket he wore to the rehearsal dinner. Mia feels a pang of sympathy toward him, watching him. He just seems so human in this moment, and he’s trying so hard.

“Liam?” Mia says, and he meets her eyes. “Thank you for promising.”

Liam smiles warmly at her. “You’re welcome. We’ll be right next door if you need anything.”

“Okay,” Mia says.

When he’s shut the door behind him, Amir scoffs at her. “Ass kisser,” he says.

She shoves him so hard he almost rolls off the bed, but stops himself at the last second and glares at her. “Can you stop? Can you just not?”

“You don’t even care,” Amir snaps. “You don’t care at all that our dads are never getting back together.”

“No, I don’t,” Mia says, bouncing off the bed and going into the kitchen to wash her face, pulling out the little step stool from under the sink so she can reach the faucet.

Amir follows her and hangs in the doorway sulkily. “Why not?”

“‘Cos I don’t want them to be. They weren’t happy, they fought. You just don’t remember any of that.”

“Maybe it never happened,” Amir challenges. “Maybe you’re making that up, or you don’t remember either.”

“Then why’d they split up, dummy?”

Amir struggles for an answer to this and doesn’t find one. “That doesn’t mean I want them to marry other people!”

Mia looks over at him mid-wash, her face dripping. “We’re allowed to like Liam, okay? He makes Dad happy.”

“It’s not about Liam,” he insists.

“How is it not? You’re fine with liking Harry. You don’t talk back to Harry all the time like you do to Liam.”

“It’s different.”

“How?”

“‘Cos! He moved on first! He moved on way before baba did!”

“But it wasn’t ‘cos of Liam,” Mia says. “He would’ve moved on with somebody. He told me that. He said he didn’t like being a single dad, he felt lonely.”

“He wouldn’t be a single dad,” Amir scoffs. “He has Dad.”

“Single dad just means you’re a dad and you’re single. They broke up, they weren’t a couple anymore, so he was single.”

“They didn’t _have_ to break up.”

“But they did, though!”

Amir doesn’t have a response to this; he just goes glumly silent.

“You should be glad he picked Liam,” Mia says. “‘Cos Liam used to be friends with baba and wants to be on his good side.”

“But they don’t even like each other,” Amir says.

“Maybe they’ll start liking each other again,” Mia says. “You know they used to be like, best friends.”

Amir shrugs. “But baba says half the stuff that happened in the band was fake anyway.”

“No, they weren’t fake friends. I can tell. Liam’s whole face pinched in when you asked if they hate each other.”

“‘Cos he wants everyone to like him,” Amir retorts.

“Now you’re just repeating stuff you’ve overheard.” She tosses the washcloth to the side and picks up her toothbrush. “Get ready for bed.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Amir says, even as he’s coming over to the second sink beside her.

Mia stares absently at herself in the mirror as she brushes, then spits and says, “Why did you want to be in the wedding party if you’re so mad they’re getting married?”

Amir is quiet for a moment as he swipes the washcloth over his face. “I’m not mad,” he finally says. “I just kind of wish everything was different.”

“But you can make the choice not to wish that anymore,” Mia says.

Amir shoots a look at her. “Maybe _you_ can.”

“No. Everyone can. Because nothing’s going to be different, so wishing for that just makes you dumb. The only person it’s hurting is you.”

“Dad hurts too,” he snaps.

“No, he doesn’t,” Mia says. “He’s happy with Harry now.”

“Then why didn’t he come tonight?”

“I dunno, ‘cos he’s busy, he’s probably with Harry somewhere.”

“But they’re coming together,” Amir says stubbornly. “They could be together here.”

“Fine,” Mia says, exasperated, “whatever, but you’re not going to change anything by being mean to Liam. The dads aren’t getting back together. _Ever._ ”

“I’m not mean to Liam.”

“You are. You hurt his feelings. He just wants you to like him.”

“I _know_ , okay?” Amir snaps. “I know! Stop acting like you’re the president of how everyone else feels!”

“I don’t!”

“Yeah, you do! You’re so freaking bossy and annoying!”

“I’m just trying to make sure you don’t screw up Dad’s wedding being a whiny baby about it!” Mia shouts back at him.

They’re quiet for a long moment, just stewing in their annoyance at each other. Then Amir mutters, “I just feel like everything happened so fast. I don’t remember Dad being alone.”

“Oh,” Mia says.

“I just remember them telling us they were getting a divorce, and then I remember Dad going on dates with Liam. It doesn’t feel like there was any time in between that.”

“There was time,” she says. “Dad was sad for a while after they broke up. He cried a lot, and his album came out, and we moved out of our old house. Then Liam came after that.”

Amir shrugs. “I didn’t say it was true, it’s just what I feel. I don’t remember.”

“You were littler than me,” she says.

“Yeah.”

Mia returns to brushing her teeth, her face hot and her throat tight for reasons she can’t identify. They grow quiet, quiet enough that they can hear the storm outside lashing the windows.

The door to the suite opens, then, and Liam and Sunday walk in, peering into the bathroom doorway. Sunday’s already in her pajamas, holding a toothbrush in one hand and a stuffed lion in the other.

“Hi,” Mia says with a mouthful of toothpaste. Amir waves.

“Right, so I’ve locked this door to the hall here,” Liam says. “And we’ve got the adjoining suite, so knock on our door if… I dunno, you need a spider killed or something.”

“There’s spiders?” Sunday says in alarm.

“Noo,” Liam backtracks. “Well, maybe. It’s tropical here. I dunno.”

“There’s spiders everywhere,” Amir says. “Except like, Antarctica.”

“There you are,” Liam says, and strokes Sunday’s curly hair. “Alright, I’m off. TV’s hooked up to your Fire stick, if you want to watch some Youtube or something. Don’t stay up too late, ‘cos I’ll be waking you to get ready around eight.”

Mia sighs. This means he’ll be waking them at 7:45 on the dot. “Okay.”

“Goodnight loves,” Liam calls, and heads deeper into their suite. They hear him knock on the adjoining door a moment later, then Louis yelling, “Not locked, Payno!”

Mia steps back from the sink and nods at Sunday to go brush her teeth, then perches on the edge of the tub, watching Amir and Sunday side by side in the mirror. They’re funnily similar in some ways, even though they’d never admit it. She thinks it’s because they were only born a week apart.

“How itchy are our dresses?” Sunday says, catching Mia’s eye in the mirror.

“They’re actually not,” Mia says. “I picked them out, they’re comfy.”

“Oh, good,” Sunday says in relief. “Dads suck at picking out dresses.”

“I know, they always pick the most itchy one they find. I think they think that means it’s pretty.”

“My mom’s good at that,” Sunday says. “Buying me clothes.”

She goes quiet then.

“Amir, you like your suit, right?” Mia says, in an attempt at detente with him.

He gives a final spit and starts rinsing his brush. “It’s fine,” he mutters. “I don’t care about clothes being comfortable.”

“You don’t like wearing a tie, though,” Mia says.

Amir shrugs. “This one’s not that bad. It’s soft.”

Freshly scrubbed, they go settle onto their beds — Mia and Sunday in the one they’re sharing, and Amir in the one he gets all to himself.

“Are you lonely?” Mia teases him.

Amir spreads out like a starfish and sticks his tongue out at them. “No, I’m not, smelly girls.”

“We’re _smelly_?” Sunday says.

“Yeah, you smell like horses, and Mia just smells.”

Mia looks at Sunday and winks, then leaps to her feet and jumps over to Amir’s bed, bouncing next to him on the mattress. Sunday quickly follows, and they bounce relentlessly on either side of him like they’re on a trampoline.

“Stop!” Amir exclaims, hitting them on the legs. “Sto-op, this is so annoying.”

Mia picks up a pillow and flings it at his face.

The adjoining suite door between the beds opens, then, and Louis pokes his head out. Sunday and Mia stop jumping, tailing off into breathless giggles.

“Fuck are you all shouting about?” he says, his voice hoarse.

“I’m being bullied,” Amir says to him, sounding extra pitiful.

Louis laughs. “Girls, leave your brother alone,” he says. “Quiet down and go to sleep, or you’re gonna be miserable tomorrow, ‘cos we’re getting up early and we’ve got a long day.”

“Fine,” Mia says, jumping back to her own bed and sitting politely with her hands clasped in her lap. Sunday follows suit.

“Good,” Louis says, and pulls the door shut again.

They’re quiet for a moment before Amir mutters, “Stepbrother.”

“Huh?” Mia says.

“I’m not Sunday’s brother,” he says, avoiding eye contact, staring at the TV.

Mia scoffs at him. “You’re just saying that ‘cos you’re annoyed at us.”

“No, I’m not! What if our dads split up? Liam’s going to take her away, and we’ll never get to see her again. That’s a stepbrother.”

“What?” Mia cries. “Dad loves Sunday, she’s the twins’ sister, he wouldn’t let that happen.”

She turns to Sunday next to her, and Sunday shrugs. “He’s kind of right,” she says in a soft voice.

“No,” Mia says fiercely. “He’s wrong, and both of you shut up. _I_ wouldn’t let that happen, so everyone just be happy they’re getting married and stop saying all this sad stuff. Besides, Sunday, your dad just told us that even if anything happens with him and Dad, he still wants to be in our lives and be there for us.”

“He did?” Sunday says, looking surprised.

“Yeah! So he’s not going to take you away. We’re sisters. Shut up.”

Sunday laughs. “Okay.”

She rounds on Amir. “And you stop being mean ‘cos you feel guilty about secretly being happy for Dad and wanting him to marry Liam. You’re not doing anything to hurt baba. He _wants_ us to be happy.”

Amir shrugs, but doesn’t argue.

“Now go put your pajamas on in the bathroom.”

“Why do _I_ have to go to the bathroom?” he demands.

“‘Cos you’re the boy, and Sunday’s here,” Mia says.

“Tell her to close her eyes.”

“She’s not closing her eyes! Go!”

Amir looks like he’s pissed, but after a moment he starts laughing. “Whatever,” he says, sliding off of bed and gathering up his pajamas from his suitcase.

“He didn’t mean that,” Mia says to Sunday when he’s shut the door. “He’s not mad at you. He’s mad at the world.”

“I know,” Sunday says quietly, her face as serene and unruffled as ever. “It didn’t hurt my feelings.”

“It’s okay if it did, though.”

Sunday’s brow knits, and she looks down at her hands like her feelings might be written on them for her to interpret. “It didn’t,” she says after a moment.

“He loves you, I know he does. When you fell off your horse and had to go get X-rays, Amir cried ‘til we found out you were gonna be okay.”

Sunday looks surprised. “I didn’t know about that.”

“He just acts tough,” Mia says. “He’s not.”

“I knew _that_ ,” Sunday says, and they both laugh.

*

“What was it?” Liam says from the bed as Louis crosses the room from the adjoining suite door he’s just shut and locked. 

“Just the kids goofing around,” Louis says. He retrieves the still-lit joint that he left on the bedside table, and takes a deep drag off it.

Liam sets his phone aside, reaches up to grab Louis’ waist and yanks him in close. Louis giggles and presses a kiss to his forehead, breathing hot acrid weed smoke out in his face.

“I’m twisted,” Louis announces.

Liam pats him on the waist. “Yeah?”

Louis grins at him, his face doing that feral, vulpine thing it does sometimes. “Yeah. And I want you.”

Liam squeezes him. “With the kids next door?”

“Please, we’ve had five kids for a year now, like this is the first time we’ve fucked in the room next to them?”

“Yeah, I know, just… we supposed to do that tonight? Thought we were saving it for tomorrow night.”

“It’s for whatever night we wanna do it.” Louis reaches down and starts massaging his cock through his boxers, making him exhale softly and arch his back against the pillows. “Come on. You tired or something? You don’t like me anymore?”

“No,” Liam says, laughing. “Well, the first one, maybe. And I’ve just had that chat with your kids…”

“What about it?”

“Just their reactions. Bit of a buzzkill.”

Louis grins at him. “Yeah, sorry, those two won’t quite give you those little Hallmark channel moments you’re lookin’ for.”

“I didn’t even want _that,_ just… y’know.”

“Whatever they said, they were testing you, love.”

“No, that’s the thing,” Liam explains, “Amir was partly testing me, partly, like, dead serious, sitting there with his sad little face. ‘Do you and Zayn hate each other?’ Like, Jesus.”

“It’s fine. I try to just tell them the truth, or as much as’s reasonable, anyway…”

“I didn’t really do that,” Liam admits. “I mean, I did, but I also didn’t.”

Louis laughs, taking another long drag off the joint and exhaling smoke through his nostrils. “That’s alright. They don’t expect you to, anyway.” He stretches out over Liam, kissing his neck and jaw. “Wanna go do something?”

“Do something?”

“Go explore. Get into some mischief. I’m not tired at all... ‘s’only nine.”

Liam wants to say no, but Louis is kissing his ear now, and has gone back to rubbing his dick.

“Nothing illegal,” he says weakly.

Louis laughs and doesn’t reply.

*

They go next door to Liam’s parents’ suite to check in on the twins and find them fast asleep, cuddled up together in the middle of a queen bed. Louis goes over to pet them both on the head, smiling at them. They look like little angels when they’re asleep.

“Hi babies,” he whispers, stroking Patrick’s hair back from his face and booping Max on the nose.

“We’re gonna go for a walk,” Liam explains to his parents, while Louis texts Mia _liam and i are out for a walk, you know where everyone else’s rooms are if you have a nightmare or need something x_

_Okay,_ she texts back near-instantly.

_put your phone down and go to sleep!_

_stop texting me then!!!!!_

“Alright,” Geoff says amiably. “Looks like it quit raining. Don’t get lost, though.”

“Yeah, not the night before, please,” Karen says with a laugh.

*

The lobby is silent downstairs; the front desk clerks are looking at their phones.

“Do you need anything?” one calls to them.

“Nope!” Louis calls back, dragging Liam to the side door that leads to the pools. He’s been as energetic as his teenage self lately; he’s been working out a lot ahead of the wedding, joining Liam on jogs and actually finishing with him instead of stopping a couple miles in and declaring Liam a psychopath before heading home.

It’s probably because the twins are finally sleeping a straight eight or nine hours without waking, which this time last year felt like an impossible dream. Liam hadn’t realized that they would both have individual sleep schedules, and this meant that some nights they were being woken up in shifts every thirty minutes, enough to drive anyone to the brink of insanity. The first time that happened made Liam feel like he had woken up as a prisoner of war in a foreign country.

Outside, the air is thick with the smell of rain, and massive dark leaves that were knocked off the trees are stuck wetly to the marble patio. The sky isn’t black, but instead a hazy bruised gray, with strange light filling the nighttime air. The resort grounds seem to be empty post-storm. There are a few lit fire pits dotting the beach with groups of people gathered around them, and lit-up yachts bobbing in the harbor, but the pool deck is deserted.

“What d’you wanna do?” Louis says, swinging their hands together. “We can go down to the beach…”

“Nah,” Liam says. “Not safe. No lifeguard.”

“Oh, you baby, I don’t mean to swim. Just to look for shells and things.”

“There's probably jellyfish washed up and shit. You _would_ step on a jellyfish the night before our wedding.”

“Little baby man,” Louis jibes.

“Remember when you nearly died to a sea urchin?”

“The one time anything happened to me in thirty-four years!” Louis cries. “And you never want to let me back in the ocean now?”

“We barely made it past judge’s house!”

“Well, we lost anyway, so there’s that.”

Liam laughs.

They keep walking, across the patio and over to the first pool they come to, an infinity pool that overlooks the ocean and uses an optical illusion to meld with it so it appears to go on endlessly. It’s weird with no one here, just empty lounge chairs all around.

Louis drags Liam by the hand to the lip of the pool, then turns and starts pulling his clothes off of him. Liam stares over his shoulder at the dark blue surface, rippled by the wind. His shirt goes off over his head, and then Louis begins to tug his boxers down off his bum.

“We skinny-dipping?” Liam says softly.

“Unless you’re not up for it,” Louis challenges, his eyes twinkling.

“Since when can’t I keep up with you?” he challenges back.

“Good.”

Louis shimmies out of his own clothes until he’s naked, too. They smile at each other, then Louis gets a wicked look and shoves him into the pool.

Even though the air is thickly humid, the water is cold in a way that shocks his system. Liam fights his way to the surface, choking out, “Arsehole!” through a mouthful of water.

Louis falls out giggling and then jumps in after him. As soon as he comes up, Liam cuts his hand across the water to splash him in the face.

“Knock it off!” Louis exclaims, squeezing his eyes shut, his nose wrinkling. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Feels good though, right?”

Liam nods. They went surfing as soon as they got here this morning, and they’re both pink with sunburn, so any cool sensation is nice.

They find water guns abandoned on the edge of the pool by a chair and play around in the water for a while, laughing their asses off, until they realize an older couple is staring at them as they cut across the pool deck toward one of the paths to the beach. Liam forgot they’re not actually supposed to be in the pool after hours. And they’ve abandoned all their clothes on the deck, so even though it’s dark, it might be obvious that they’re skinny dipping. Oh well.

“Hullo,” Louis calls, mock-friendly.

“Hi,” the woman calls back. The man waves.

When they’re gone, Liam picks up an abandoned water gun and shoots some water directly into Louis’ face.

Louis swims over to him, looking coyly flirtatious, then spits a mouthful of pool water into Liam’s eyes.

Liam ducks his head, squinting against the sting. “Fuck off!”

“I love you too,” Louis coos, kissing him on the mouth.

Liam wraps his arms around him and swims back up against the wall, so they’re ballasted. Louis wraps his arms around Liam’s neck and nuzzles him.

“My fuckin’ eyes are burning,” Liam mutters, dragging his teeth over the exposed side of Louis’ throat.

Louis wriggles in his arms and presses a kiss to his shoulder. “You mardy?”

“A little.”

“Why don’t you fuck me ‘til I act right, then? Make me be your good boy.”

“You wanna go back to our room?” Liam says, rubbing at his left eye and kissing Louis again, this time hard on the mouth.

When they come up for air, Louis murmurs, “No, let’s fuck outside. I wanna fuck outside, we haven’t done that in a long time.”

The way he purrs this makes it impossible to say no to, so Liam immediately starts thinking logistics. “Can’t fuck on the beach,” he says. “Too many people. Too many crabs.”

“Resort’s got a golf course,” Louis says.

“It’s closed at night, innit?”

“Is it _closed_ closed though? ‘Cos there’s not, like, a fence. Reckon you can just walk on.”

“Sounds risky,” Liam says dubiously.

“Who gives a shit? What are they gonna do, hmm? With all the business we’ve brought them?”

“They _could_ kick us out and cancel our wedding,” Liam counters.

“Well, I think that’d honestly be a bit hilarious,” Louis says. “C’mon, let’s do something stupid, please. We never do anythin’ stupid together now, we’re just dads. I, y’know… I missed out on being with you when we were young, you know? I wanna do stupid, irresponsible shit as a couple.”

He sounds sad, almost pleadingly so, so Liam relents. They scamper out of the pool and hurry their clothes back on, crouching awkwardly in case anyone else comes out on the deck. But no one does. They hear echoing laughter from the beach, and that’s all.

Liam has a little chill from his shirt clinging to his wet body, but the air is still hot, even though it rained.

“It’s not supposed to storm tomorrow, right?” he says to Louis, who nods as he leads Liam along the path toward the golf course.

“Clear all day,” he says. “Allegedly. If not, oh well. We’ll bring everyone inside and get ‘em drunk.”

“That’s always your plan.”

“Safe bet for a load of English people.”

“Yeah,” Liam says, “I’m a bit worried about your groomsmen. Mine as well, actually. All gonna be pretty badly hungover tomorrow.”

“Lottie’s the only one I really need,” Louis says, laughing. “So the rest can be throwing up in the bushes if they can’t hang. I’m sure they’ll be fine, though. I’ve seen them functional after much worse nights.”

“By the way, you look great,” Liam says. “Have I told you that? I meant to. Not that you don’t normally look great. You know what I mean, right?”

Louis turns to eye him, walking backwards. He looks amused.

“Sorry,” Liam says, laughing. “You know what I mean! You’ve been working out a lot. You’ve got a nice tone to you.”

“Have I?” Louis says, sounding pleased.

“Yeah! I like when you put a bit of muscle on. You bulk up in nice places.”

“Oh, alright, so you’re just saying you like my bum,” Louis says, rolling his eyes and turning back around. “Not exactly news.”

“Not just your bum! Your thighs look nice. Your shoulders, arms.”

Louis stops for him, and when Liam catches up, he slings an arm around his shoulders.

“Hi,” Liam murmurs, kissing him on the cheek. “It’s so hard to give you a compliment sometimes.”

“No, I liked it,” Louis says, pinching him on the hip. “Thanks.”

“You’re quite welcome, angel.”

“Lemme give you one back,” Louis says, scanning him up and down. “Well, you look like you normally do. Actually, know what, you’ve been a bit more solid, and I like that, so cheers.”

“I think it’s ‘cos I’m back on that whey powder and been putting it in your shakes,” Liam says. “Gains maximized. I’ve noticed you haven’t been smoking either, healthy boy.”

“Yeah,” Louis sighs wistfully. “It’s just we’ve got all these children now, feel like I ought to take care of myself.”

“Take care of yourself for me too, please.”

“Yeah, yeah yeah.”

As they crest the hill they’ve been walking toward, they see the clubhouse come into view. Past it is the vast expanse of the golf course, dotted with palm trees. Distantly, they can hear the ocean crashing against the craggy, loamy outcroppings that butt up against the rough.

“Look,” Louis says, pointing.

Liam follows his finger. A pair of golf carts are sitting abandoned near the entrance to the course.

“Tommo,” he says, “there’s lights on in the clubhouse. There’s probably employees in there right now.”

“Alright,” Louis says breezily, heading toward one of the carts and climbing in. “Bye then.”

“No, no, no,” Liam says, racing toward it and hopping in beside him, grimacing as his butt lands on the wet seat. “Fuck. Fine. Go.”

Louis turns the key that’s already in the ignition and slams on the gas, guiding the cart over the grassy knoll and past the little sign reading HOLE 1 PAR 4.

The course is deserted, but lit here and there by a few massive floodlights. Liam is sure there are security cameras, but it’s too late to stop Louis, who’s speeding them along in the grass as fast as a golf cart can possibly go, and probably faster than one should. The sky is still eerily bruise-colored and moonless; this is one of those nights where you suspect no one else on Earth exists but you and the person you’re with. In the distance, a mountain rises against the cloud cover like a dam holding the sea at bay.

“D’you have any idea where we’re going?” Liam shouts over the noise of the cart as it speeds along.

“No,” Louis yells back. He veers west, deeper into the course until they’re surrounded by dense trees on both sides, and then into a little valley surrounded by hills. One of the hills has a small white building atop it, but there aren’t any lights on inside.

Liam looks back down at where they’re going, and realizes they’re headed downhill toward a wide water trap. “Tommo. Tommo, turn left.”

“I see it, I’m trying,” Louis says, and Liam glances over to see he’s wrestling with the wheel. “I can’t, like — get out, you’re dead weight, bail out.”

“Do _what_?”

“We’re straight into the water if you don’t jump out!”

Liam doesn’t have to be told twice; he bails into the soft grass, which scrapes him on impact but doesn’t do any worse damage than that. He immediately jumps to his feet and runs after the cart, which has managed to turn slightly left but not much moreso. “Louis!” he yells. “You jump too!”

He doesn’t, though. He manages to avoid the water by mere inches, but he speeds over the edge of the putting green and ends up crashing down into a sand trap on the other side. The cart tips over with a _whump_ into the sand, its wheels spinning pointlessly.

Liam runs after it, unable to stop himself from laughing. “LOUIS,” he yells. “You okay?”

A thumbs up appears over the side of the golf cart.

Liam doesn’t stop running, although by the time he gets there, Louis is already popping up like a meerkat, his hair mussed and his nose bloody.

He climbs over the side of the cart, shaking his head and laughing. Liam grabs him by the shoulders, his heart still pounding. “You okay?” he repeats.

Louis nods. He’s laughing now too. “Are you?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Extremely fuckin’ unsafe, those things are.”

Liam wipes away his nosebleed as they stand there, both swaying from adrenaline. “You hit your face?”

Louis nods. “Just banged it off the steering wheel. I’m fine.”

“Oh, babe.”

“I’m fine, really.”

Liam wipes his bloody hand on his shorts and gazes at Louis, who looks sort of pitiful, blood smeared over his top lip like a mustache. They both crack up again.

“Never stealing a golf cart with you ever again,” Liam says. “You nearly kill someone every time.”

“Oh, we would’ve been fine,” Louis scoffs. “Would’ve just ended up in a couple feet of water. Just glad we don’t owe this fuckin’ resort golf cart replacement money, they’re cleaning us out as it is.”

“ _We_? That would have gone on your tab, baby love.”

“Ooh, baby love,” Louis sings, “my baby love… I need you, baby love…”

He’s beautiful to Liam right now — tan, his light eyes sparkling in his flushed face, smiling impishly. He looks vital, like he’s so happy it’s spilling out from his insides, shining through to his outsides.

Liam takes Louis’ face in his hands, kissing him. “I think you’re a little high,” he murmurs against his lips. “And still a little drunk.”

“I think you’re right,” Louis murmurs back. “And _you_ let me operate heavy machinery in this state, you’re an accessory.”

“I think any jury would agree you bullied me,” Liam says, gazing into his eyes.

“Bullied you,” Louis scoffs, petting at Liam’s chest with a tattooed hand. “Poor big Payno, so beaten down by mean Louis. Spends half the day throwing tires around the gym but cowers around little me.”

“You flirted me into it.”

“Did I?” Louis says, grinning. Liam kisses him again, hard, their noses banging. “I think you were flirtin’ with _me_ ,” he continues a bit breathlessly. “Couldn’t shut up about me body. Molesting me in the pool in front of all those old people.”

Liam giggles and drags Louis down into the grass, then rolls him over onto his back and starts tugging his surf shorts down off his arse. “Dickhead. God, I wanna fuck you so bad.”

“See,” Louis teases, his light eyes dancing. He nuzzles Liam’s neck, kissing his jaw. “Aren’t you glad I dragged you out of bed? You wanted to go to sleep at nine p.m., like we’re fucking eighty.”

“And if we had, we wouldn’t have committed a crime, and you wouldn’t have a bruised nose in our wedding photos…”

Even as he says this, he’s pulling Louis’ shorts down around his knees and working on his own cock with one hand. Luckily he’s hard already — adrenaline usually does that for him, if it’s adrenaline sustained in the company of Louis. Even before they ever got together, Louis almost getting them both killed always made him a little hard. There’s no one else he’d rather die with.

Liam ducks his head to lick and suck at Louis’ cock, making a soft moan catch in Louis’ throat. He keeps stroking himself as he takes him gag-deep, pulses of arousal pounding blood to his cock as Louis makes those tender little noises of his.

When he’s hard enough to fuck, he abandons Louis’ cock to spit his precome into his hand and lube up his own, stretching out over him as he slides in. Louis moans again, much louder now, and starts scratching Liam’s back.

It’s insane for them to do this, but that’s why it’s hot, because they’re outside in the gorgeous open air of Hawaii, on the grounds of an expensive and tightly managed resort, and they’re still stupidly famous no matter what they do. But all Liam cares about is the feel of cool grass on his knees and the hot tightness of his almost-husband around his dick, the sting of Louis’ freshly cut fingernails raking down his back, the hot surge of his tongue in Liam’s mouth.

“I love you,” Liam pants as he’s fucking into him. Louis’ thighs bracket his waist, muscle squeezing him on either side. “Fuck, you feel good. I could fuck you all night…”

“I want that,” Louis breathes. “I want you…” He brings a hand to the back of Liam’s neck, raking his hair against the grain, digging his nails into his scalp.

“I wanna fuck you so hard you can’t walk tomorrow…”

“Fu-uck,” Louis whines. The sound of this makes Liam throb. “Stop, I’m gonna come.”

“Serves you right for walking around like you do,” Liam breathes against his throat. “Teasin’ me all day...”

“No teasin’, no teasin’,” Louis begs frantically. “You can ‘ave me anytime you want —“

Liam kisses his neck messily with teeth and tongue, sucking a little, hard enough to make him writhe but not hard enough to make a hickey. Normally he’d at least make an attempt to not come fast, but he knows it’s a lost cause, and he doesn’t want to get caught besides, so he just fucks him like crazy. He can’t ignore the noises Louis is making, anyway — moans and cries so loud they ring in his ears. They’ve been so busy lately they haven’t had the energy for anything but blowjobs, and Louis needs this, he really does.

“I’m gonna come too,” Liam mumbles in a low, hoarse voice, his breath hot on Louis’ skin.

“Already?” Louis breathes.

Liam works his fingers into Louis’ hair and tightens them into a fist, making him gasp softly. “Sorry,” he rasps, “you’re too tight…”

He groans in Louis’ ear as he comes inside of him, thighs shaking, eyelids fluttering, then goes boneless atop him. God, that feels good. He hasn’t felt this good in a while.

Louis, breathing heavily under him, works his hand up in between their bodies and starts stroking his own cock.

“Wait, lemme…” Liam shifts so he can help, but Louis shakes his head.

“Lemme do it,” he says, his own voice husky too. “I got it. You’re all lazy now, you’re not gonna… ohh…” His eyes roll back a little. “Just don’t take your willy out of me.”

“Okay,” Liam agrees, and starts kissing his neck again, then tips his face to the side so he can suck and bite on Louis’ lower lip the way he likes.

Louis’ breath keeps hitching as he works his hand, and he moans softly, making Liam’s cock twitch inside him. Liam just lays there lazily, stroking Louis’ hair and tracing the line of his cheekbone as he works, his lips parted, his eyes shut.

Finally Louis comes too, sighing shakily, eyelashes fluttering, hot come splattering upwards into Liam’s chest hair. That’s going to be annoying to scrub out, but who cares.

“That was really good,” Louis murmurs.

Liam plays with his hair some more. “Yeah,” he agrees.

He shakes his head, eyes still closed. “I really want a cigarette right now.”

“Me too, actually.”

“Payno?”

“Yeah?”

In a tiny voice, Louis says, “Thank you for marrying me.”

Liam’s heart skips a beat, and he clutches Louis tighter, pressing kisses to his neck and chest. “Yeah, quite the imposition you’ve laid on me,” he says gruffly, and Louis laughs.

“Y’know, Zayn never fucked me the way you do,” he murmurs.

Liam freezes, shocked, and tries not to grin like an idiot. He doesn’t know how to respond, but then the silence stretches out, so he jokes, “What, in missionary?”

“No, it just never felt this good.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Louis says. His eyes open, and he gazes at Liam, smiling. “I mean, it was good with him, don’t get me wrong… it’s just different with you.”

“Different how?”

“Well, your willy bein’ a little bigger helps.”

“Louis…”

He grins with cocky mischief. “Biggest bloke I’ve ever been with, actually. You oughta feel good about that.”

Liam’s cheeks heat up. “C’mon, with that shit.”

“What, babe?” Louis says innocently.

“That’s just you trying to get me riled up,” Liam says. “You’re always trying to make the alpha come out.”

“Well, maybe I like to see it,” he teases.

“Give me a real answer, not porno talk.”

“Ah… I just feel safe with you. I dunno. The way you fuck me, the way you hold me.” Louis’ voice cracks on _hold_. “Like I’m the only person on the planet. I just feel safe with you.”

“That makes it better?”

“It lets me, like, really feel it… really be in me body. I feel it all over when you turn me on, I get, like, hot in the scalp and like, tingly in me feet, it’s weird.”

Liam is deeply touched and gratified by this, though he still has no idea what to say. “That can be your vows,” he offers.

Louis giggles. “‘Hello, friends and family, and my little children. Liam fucks me so good, I love his willy. It’s me favorite willy in the world. Thank you for coming.’”

“Are you thanking your guests, or me willy?”

“Both.” They laugh.

“Your willy’s my favorite as well,” Liam says. “It’s pretty.”

“I dunno if I want to hear that it’s _pretty_ ,” Louis says.

“I just mean when I look at it I wanna play with it. I like how it looks.”

“Cheers. You’re welcome to do that whenever, by the way.”

Liam laughs and leans in to kiss him again. Louis tips his head back, biting at Liam’s bottom lip, flicking his tongue in.

Because of all the giggling and kissing, Liam doesn’t realize until the last possible moment that someone is walking across the grass toward them. A massive flashlight beam shines in his eyes as he looks up, and then he can’t see anything, it’s all spots.

“Fuck,” Louis says, realizing too.

“Don’t move,” Liam whispers.

Louis ignores this and reaches one hand out toward the grass beside them, fumbling for his shorts.

“What are you doing?” Liam hisses.

The person stops right next to them. Liam squints blearily up, his eyes burning. It’s a dark-haired man in a security guard uniform.

“Hi,” Liam says, his voice high. He’s never experienced a stranger staring down at his naked arse while he has his penis inside another person. It’s very unpleasant.

“Course closes at seven,” the man says impassively, like he catches rich idiots _in flagrante delicto_ all the time. Come to think of it, he probably does.

Louis finally stops fumbling as he unearths his wallet from his shorts pocket, then slaps it open and slips something out of it. Liam looks down: several hundred-dollar bills.

“Hullo,” Louis says, extending the money up toward the guard, his other hand shading his eyes from the flashlight. “You look like a smart bloke. So I’m thinking you’d like to just take this and forget you saw us?”

The guy takes the money and idly counts it, then slides it into his pocket. “Sure.”

It can’t be that easy, can it? Liam barely dares move a muscle.

“Aren’t you those guys from that boyband?” the guard says, tipping his flashlight away from them so they’re no longer going teary-eyed.

“Nope,” Louis chirps. “Just look like ‘em.”

“Weird,” the guard says. “‘Cos those guys are getting married here tomorrow.”

“Wow, what a coincidence,” Liam says, laughing wheezily.

“Have a nice night,” the guard says, strolling away. “I’d advise putting some clothes on and going back to your hotel,” he calls over his shoulder.

As soon as he’s gone, they lose their minds laughing and scramble to their feet.

“That could’ve been so bad,” Liam hisses as they get dressed frantically, crouching behind the overturned golf cart.

“So?” Louis hisses back, sliding his sandals on. “We’re fine!”

“That was like four different crimes! And now he knows who we are!”

“He was cool,” Louis scoffs. “We’d deny it, anyway. There’s no cameras round this hole, I looked.”

“How d’you know what a security camera looks like?”

“How d’you _not_ know?”

“How’d he see us, then?” Liam demands, getting even more annoyed as he realizes he put his shirt on backwards and has to shimmy his arms back out.

Louis points up at the little white outpost, which the guard is unlocking the door to. “See? He’s probably in there on the night shift, and I clued him in by, y’know —“

“Moaning and swearing so loud everyone could probably hear you for three miles?”

“Oh, _sorry,”_ Louis exclaims, rolling his eyes. “I’ll just lie there in silence while you fuck me, is that better? You want to marry another dead fish like your ex-wife?”

“Hey! I confided that in you, secretly _,_ don’t use it against me!”

“How didn’t he see us crash the cart?” Louis says in curiosity, then squints at the little building and walks off to the left.

Liam watches him, half-afraid the guard is going to spot him and decide to renege on their agreement.

“Oh!” Louis says, laughing. “He’s in there watching porn, he must’ve been distracted. Ain’t that funny? What a trip to look up from your porn and see the real thing.”

“Let’s go,” Liam begs him. “We’ve got like a mile walk back, and we’ve got to shower again, now.”

Louis walks back over to him, smiling, looking even more mussed and silly than he did before. “Yeah, I really shouldn’t’ve let you come in me. This is gonna make for some fuckin’ miserable walking.”

“Then why’d you drag me to a golf course to fuck you, Tommo? And with no condom?”

He shrugs. “Wasn’t thinking too hard. I just wanted to blow off some steam the night before.”

“Well, steam blown.”

Louis slips an arm around his waist and kisses him on the cheek, then starts leading him back the direction they came. They tread carefully in the darkness, hanging onto each other.

“No more stealing golf carts,” Liam says in his best stern voice.

“Uh-huh,” Louis sings.

“I mean it.”

“Sure, love.” He grabs Liam’s hand and brings it to his waist, sliding it inside his swim trunks, then guides it to his damp, sticky inner thigh. “Feel that? See what you’ve done when you fuckin’ cummed in me?”

“What was I meant to do!” Liam exclaims, pinching him on the arse cheek before withdrawing his hand.

“Pull out and come in the grass!”

“Aw, c’mon.”

*

“Maybe we’ll have a golf course baby,” Liam says to Louis once they’re out of the shower, having just spent half an hour wiping dried come and dirt off of each other with a flannel. Louis had grass stains on his arse, which they both thought was very funny.

Louis, who’s brushing his teeth, looks askance at him in the mirror. He spits, then says, “Liam, angel, sweetheart, honey? There’s not gonna be no more babies, okay? They cut me tubes apart and cauterized ‘em with a fucking soldering iron or summat. Might’ve used a clothes iron for all I know.”

Liam winces. “No, I know, I know,” he says wistfully. “I’m not being stupid on purpose, I swear, it’s just a fantasy sort of thing. Our boys are just so great, I’d love one more.”

“Yeah, our _boysss_ ,” Louis says, rinsing his brush. “Plural. Got two out of me. That’s plenty.”

“If we had six kids, then it’d be even numbers,” Liam says. “We could get a minivan, y’know? Does Audi make minivans?”

Louis lets out a soft, strangled laugh. “Payno…”

“I just really loved making babies with you, angel.”

“Well, it was quite simple on your end.”

Liam drops the towel and comes over to him, wrapping his arms around his waist and pulling him close. They stare at themselves in the mirror, and Liam kisses his neck.

“I know it was tough on you,” he says. “I don’t mean to minimize that. Sorry. I just think of the things we missed out on, ‘cos it was twins and you were so worn out all the time.”

“Things like what?”

“I dunno. Cute shit… maternity photos.”

“I was never gonna do those. My God. It’s like you’ve never met me.”

Liam tightens his arms around Louis and blows a raspberry on his neck, making him laugh. “I know, alright? It’s just hard to reconcile, like — I love you so much ‘cos you are the person you are, but I also want to do corny shit with you ‘cos of how I love you, y’know? But you don’t want to do that shit ‘cos you’re you, and I love you ‘cos you’re you.”

Louis smiles. “We didn’t _have_ to do the corny shit,” he says. “That’s for people who are insecure about what they’ve got, yeah? I’m not. Listen, honestly, there’s no one on earth besides you who I would’ve been happy about getting knocked up with twins by. But they were yours, so I was over the moon.”

Liam hugs him closer and kisses his jaw. “Yeah?”

“Yeah! I was proper delusional wiv it. Pregnant with two little boys, when we had three kids at home? I should’ve been suicidal, but I had love delusions. I was just like, oh, I can’t wait to meet my little Liam babies, I bet they’ll be lovely. And they are! So just be happy with what we’ve got.”

“No, I am, I am. I completely am. It’s just — I can't be pregnant, that’s all, so I get a bit wistful about that time, I s’pose.”

Louis smiles at him. “You jealous?”

“A little, honestly! I wish I could make a person. It’s like making an album times ten thousand.”

“It is proper cool,” Louis admits. “As much as I hated, like, the day-to-day of it, it’s a cool feeling. Very powerful. And everyone treats you like royalty.”

“Ugh, braggy man.”

Louis kisses him on the jaw. “I love you too, by the way.”

“Do you?” Liam teases.

“Yeah! That’s why I’ve planned this whole wedding for you, innit? If you think this is just the sort of shit I’d do for kicks, then you’ve lost the plot. Fuckin’ arguing with some Hawaiian bird about how tall the candles should be... I was about ready to launch meself straight out a fuckin’ window.”

Liam laughs hard at this. “Can’t believe it’s tomorrow.”

“I can’t either. Hey, remember when you proposed to me the first time? We were in that terrible hotel in, ah... Helsinki, I think it was.”

“Oh, my dumbfuck proposal that I didn’t think through at all?”

“No, it was sweet,” Louis exclaims, squeezing his hand. “I appreciated it.”

“I would’ve done it, y’know,” Liam says, kissing his neck. “Would’ve married you.”

“I know you would’ve. I only appreciated it ‘cos I believed you.”

Liam reaches up and touches a finger to Louis’ nose, which has a red mark on the bridge and is starting to swell a bit. Louis makes a sad face.

“Wanna ice that?” Liam says.

“Yeah, let’s.”

Liam goes down the hall to scrape some ice out of the machine into a plastic cup, then brings it back to their room and wraps it in several layers of paper towel. Louis lies down on the bed so Liam can press it to his nose, wincing when he does.

“Steady,” Liam says.

“I’m alright,” Louis says. “Just achy.”

They’re quiet for a moment. Liam strokes a piece of hair back from Louis’ forehead.

“Hey,” Louis says, gazing up at him. He clears his throat. “Did you ever, um — did Zayn say anything to you, after he found out we’d been sleeping together?”

Liam blinks at him. “Wot, like right after? Ten years ago?”

“Yeah. He never said if he did. You never did either.”

“What's making you bring _that_ up?”

“I dunno,” Louis says. “Just us getting married is bringing things up, I guess.”

Liam shakes his head and adjusts the cold compress, lifting his hand a moment and shaking it so it doesn’t cramp up. “Nah. We never talked about it, not then. I remember getting your text that he knew, and I thought he might say something… I waited on that, actually. I was dead terrified for days, jumped every time I got a text. But no, he just cut off all contact with me. We’d been talking here and there, and I never heard from him after that.”

“Oh,” Louis says.

“You surprised?”

“A bit. He said some properly unpleasant shit to me, I thought he might go and confront you.”

Liam grimaces. “How unpleasant?”

“Ahh…” He shrugs against the crimson bedsheets. “Asked if Mims was really his, stuff like that.”

“What, he thought she was _mine_?”

“Or anyone’s, was the impression I got,” Louis says in a surly way.

“Jeeee-sus…”

“Maybe not totally out of bounds, considering my behavior,” he admits, “but properly rude.”

“Yeah, not the most friendly question,” Liam says.

He’s sort of uneasy talking about this; he likes to pretend that the horrors of their early twenties never happened, that they were just a bittersweet haze that produced three lovely children and shouldn’t be prodded at or questioned, now that everyone is happy.

“Babe, fetch me a beer?” Louis says, stretching and yawning.

“So we’re done talking about Zayn, huh?”

“I just had the one question,” Louis says. “Was just curious.”

Liam leans down to kiss his cheek. “Alright.”

“Get yourself one, too,” Louis says, winking at him. “Hey, know what just hit me, since we’re getting married?”

“Is it something romantic?”

Louis laughs. “No, not at all. But I’ve just realized it’s official — neither of us’ll get to touch a pair of baps ever again.”

“Oh, you’re right,” Liam says sadly. “R-I-P to boobies.”

“We’ll ‘ave to pour one out tomorrow, during drinks.”

“You can always touch my boobies,” Liam says, then helpfully flexes his pecs.

Louis reaches out and pinches him on the nipple. “Yeah, alright. I’ll take it.”

OAHU, HAWAII, JULY 10, 2026

In a cruel twist of irony that they should have anticipated, the kids end up waking _them_ up at 6:45 a.m., after they got to asleep at half midnight thanks to an ill-advised second round of sex post-beers.

“Dad,” Mia says, patting Louis on his stubbly cheek. “Stop cuddling Liam. You have to marry him.”

Louis cracks one eye open. Someone’s thrown their blinds open, making bright Hawaiian sun stream in terroristically. And Sunday and Amir are over by the coffeemaker, trying to figure it out. It’s on, but there’s no pot under the drip mechanism, so they’re seconds away from scalding themselves.

“Oi,” he barks at them in his scary dad voice.

Sunday jumps, accidentally dropping an open bag of coffee grounds and sending a long streak of them across the floor. Amir makes his _I wasn’t doing anything_ face.

“Get your little fingers away from that thing,” Louis says. “You’ve got no idea what you’re doing.”

“We’ve watched Liam make the coffee!” Amir says.

“Then where’s the pot, loves?”

Amir and Sunday look blankly at the machine.

“I dunno,” he says.

Liam, who’s spooning Louis, clears his throat. “Why don’t you kids, um, get your bathing suits on, and go down to the pool or the lazy river? You don’t need to be ready for at least another hour.”

“Okay,” Mia chirps, and the three of them gambol back into their room like a pack of otters, shutting the door behind them.

“Thank God,” Liam exhales. “I’ve got the worst morning wood.”

“Yeah, I can feel,” Louis says, grinning, wriggling his arse against him.

“Don’t you dare!” Liam cries. “Jesus Christ, Lou...”

Louis’ watch dings with a text; he stops laughing at Liam so he can squint blearily at it. It’s from Zayn. _just got in, front desk says they don’t have a room for us??? they’re looking for you to sort it out_

“Fucking…” Louis untangles himself from Liam’s arms and slides out from under the covers. His nose is achy. “Six in the mornin’ and I’ve already got fires to put out?”

“What fires?” Liam says in his cute sleepy voice.

Louis pulls a pair of cutoff joggers on over his boxers and slides into some flip-flops. “Hotel’s fucked up Zayn and Harry’s reservation.”

“Wait, I’ll come,” Liam says, tossing the covers aside.

“What about your stiffy?”

Liam pulls on a pair of swim trunks and tucks his dick into the waistband. “Ta-daaaaa.”

“Alright,” Louis laughs. He goes over and knocks on the adjoining door. “KIDS! We’re goin’ downstairs! Find us in the lobby when you’re ready!”

“Okay!” they chorus back.

“Lobby is L on the elevator buttons!”

“I _know_! _”_ Mia shouts. “I’m _ten_!”

“Ohhhh, she’s _ten_ ,” Louis says under his breath, tying the string on his shorts. “Excuse the absolute piss out of me.”

*

None of their guests are downstairs yet — they’re likely all even more hungover than Louis is. At this hour, the expansive, foliage-laden lobby and dining area are mostly empty, dotted with older people who are actually awake at this ungodly hour. Probably the couple who interrupted them skinny-dipping is around here someplace, eating caviar on their waffles.

Harry and Zayn are lounging on a couch across from the front desk that buts up against a massive black marble pillar, both looking obnoxiously well-rested and coiffed. Their suitcases sit beside them, airport tags still on. They call hellos to Liam and Louis when they notice them. Liam says hello back, and Louis offers a little wave.

“Hi hi, what’s the problem, babe?” he says to a familiar front desk clerk, stopping in front of her and leaning forward. Behind him, he hears Liam making that how-was-your-flight small talk that he’s so good at.

“They aren’t on the list of approved guests for your block of rooms,” the clerk says apologetically. “I’ve searched about ten times now, I’m not finding anything. All your rooms on the fifth floor are booked by other people.”

“Do me a favor, search one more time?” Louis says. “Like, the whole system. Maybe they’re on the wrong floor or something.”

“Sure. One moment. By the way, security caught a few intruders about an hour ago who were trying to gate crash,” she says. “Probably paparazzi, but they didn’t actually find cameras on them.”

“Ah, alright, thanks. Your security catch that, or ours?”

“Yours,” she says apologetically. “But ours are working around the clock on perimeter management, I promise.”

Yeah, and golf course micromanagement. Louis gives her a smile and heads over to join his husband.

“‘Cos it stimulates collagen production,” Harry is saying as Louis walks up.

“Does it _really_?” Liam says, sounding fascinated. “I’ve got to try this.”

“You need your collagen produced, Payno?” Louis says.

“A bit,” Liam says. “‘Round the eyes.”

Zayn catches Louis’ eye and smiles wryly at him. He notices Harry is wearing a lei, and Zayn isn’t.

“Hullo,” Harry says to him brightly. “Big day, you excited?”

“Yeah,” Louis says. “Bit nervous for everything to go as planned.”

Really, he mostly planned this massive wedding for the kids, and for Liam. He’d be happy to do something more simple, but that doesn’t feel quite fitting of the occasion. He’s quite sure he’ll be with Liam forever, and they’re rich and famous, so that means they’re supposed to have beautiful photos of themselves getting married on the beach, and a million guests, and all that shit, just to show everyone else how serious they are. Plus, Liam likes to be a little ostentatious. He pretends he doesn’t, but he does. He’s the peacock man, and Louis the peahen.

On some level Louis does feel like it’s a personal redemption, as well — a gift to himself after a slapdash shotgun wedding and stressful marriage where he never felt particularly important, and after an exhausting pregnancy that wreaked havoc on him, at the end of which he delivered two perfect little boys to Liam. He deserves to be a prince for a day, even if it isn’t his style. If he can give that to his man, he can give it to himself.

Liam wraps an arm around his shoulders, squeezing him. “Louis did a lot of the detail work himself,” he says. “He didn’t want to let anyone else handle the little things.”

“Well, those are the things other people tend to fuck up,” he counters.

Zayn nods in agreement with this.

“Louis, that reminds me,” Harry says. “I heard this great talk at the Kabbalah Centre about perfectionism, and I thought of you… I made some notes on my phone, I'll send you them.”

“Oh, cool, mate,” Louis says. “Thanks.”

Harry’s been friendly with him lately, like he wants to be pals again, but Louis just isn’t quite there yet. Not when the sight of him with Zayn is so fresh. This is just how it is with the two of them — they dance around each other in suspicion, desperately wanting things to be normal again, but when one of them extends a kind gesture, the other instinctively ducks it out of mistrust.

“You two look quite chipper,” he says.

“I slept great on the plane,” Zayn says. “Only just woke up when we were landing.”

“I actually slept for shit, but I’ve just had a bunch of things done to my face,” Harry says, gesturing. “Not Botox. Just, y’know. Lasers... the usual.”

Beyond looking well-rested, Zayn’s eyes are dancing, like he’s about to be evil. Louis gives him an expectant look.

“So we overheard the front desk birds gossiping,” Zayn says quietly, smirking up at him. “They were talking about how apparently two idiots snuck onto the golf course last night, crashed a cart, then got caught fucking right there on the putting green.”

Louis’ face heats up, but in response he just laughs. “Interesting.”

“You didn’t hear anything about that?”

“No, nothing,” Louis says.

Zayn nods. “Uh-huh. What happened to your nose?”

Louis reaches up and touches his fingertips to the cut. “Bumped it while we were surfing,” he says smoothly.

Liam lets out a chuckle at this.

Harry presses his lips together, clearly hiding a smile. “Liam, I’m surprised at you,” he says. “I think Louis’ a bad influence.”

“I’m starting to think we’re just a bad influence on each other,” Liam says, squeezing Louis’ shoulder. “Feedback loop.”

“Hush,” Louis says, elbowing him. “I’ve got no idea what they’re talking about. I’ve never done anything wrong or illegal in me life.”

“No, never had sex in public, that’s not you at all,” Zayn replies with a smile.

This is evidently flirty enough to cross a line for everyone else present, because Harry almost immediately puts a possessive hand on Zayn’s knee, and Liam’s arm slips from Louis’ shoulder down to his waist, his hand cupping his right hipbone.

“And what did you two get up to last night?” Louis says.

Harry and Zayn exchange a sly look, clearly transported off to their own world at the very mention. Harry is smiling.

“Alright, guess that’s a secret?” Louis says bemusedly.

“Mr Tomlinson?” the front desk clerk calls.

Louis heads over to her. Liam follows him, settling both hands on his shoulders now, as if they’re in a conga line. He’s like a fucking octopus when he gets jealous. Louis would find this annoying if it weren’t both cute and comforting. “Yeah love?”

“I am so sorry,” she says, grimacing. “It was actually an error on our end, because you added them as guests later than the rest of the group? The second booking didn’t get saved into the system.”

So this is Zayn’s fault. He refused to RSVP for months, then finally gave Louis a yes back in April.

Louis turns and waves Zayn and Harry over. They sidle up to the counter expectantly.

“I have a vacant room on the fifth floor that I can put you in, and of course we’ll comp your stay there,” the clerk says to them. “But it only has two single beds, and I noticed you had requested one king.”

“Nah, put ‘em in there,” Louis says immediately. Perfect. They’re only here one night, so whatever — they can have separate beds. Let them lay a few feet apart, pathetically holding hands over the gap or whatever. In his hungover, mildly irritated state, he actually finds the concept funny.

Luckily, Harry does too. He laughs. “Like _I Love Lucy_.”

Zayn shoots Louis a look, and Louis smiles innocently back at him. “Fine,” he says. “That’s fine.”

The clerk hands them their key cards. “A porter will come get your bags,” she says. “You can head upstairs anytime.”

“Dads,” they hear Mia shout from across the atrium.

Everyone looks over; the three kids are heading away from the elevators and toward the pool deck doors, waving hugely at them. Louis is very proud to see they’re all appropriately attired in swimwear, and remembered their towels and everything. Amir even has a bottle of sunscreen in his hand. They’re growing up.

“C’mere,” Zayn shouts to them.

Mia and Amir hurry over, their flip-flops clacking on the marble floor. Sunday trails behind them, dragging an inflatable shark behind her.

Zayn bends to hug and kiss them both on the head, ruffling their hair. “Hi _beta,_ hi _beti_.”

“Hi Dad,” they chorus.

“You having fun in Hawaii?”

“It rained all day yesterday,” Amir says glumly. “And the rehearsal dinner was boring. And then everyone was drunk all night.”

“Love that enthusiasm,” Louis says, laughing.

Amir shrugs.

“He’s right, though, everyone was really drunk,” Mia says.

“Well, you’re gonna see a lot more of that tonight,” Louis says.

Sunday sidles up beside Liam, who strokes her hair.

“Hi Harry,” Amir says.

Harry waves. “Hi kids. If you lot are going to the pool, I might join you. I want to loosen my back up.”

“What’s wrong with your back?” Sunday pipes up.

“It doesn’t like me,” Harry intones humorously. “We’ve never gotten along, but it’s not for any single reason.”

“Oh, like Dad’s,” Mia says.

“Actually,” Louis says, “there are exactly three reasons I’ve got a bad back. One’s in front of me, and the other two are upstairs.”

Amir rolls his eyes. “I didn’t _mean_ to.”

“I know, I forgive you. Harry, do you need to unpack first or anything, if you’re going swimming?”

Harry unbuttons his short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt and shrugs it off. “Wore trunks on the plane,” he says, indicating them.

“Alright,” Louis says. He knows it’s completely irrational, but he gets a little nervous every time Harry watches Mia and Amir by himself. He can’t ever shake the thought that they’ll start chirping in his ear about how Harry is so cool, and why can’t you be chill like Harry, Dad?

They haven’t, yet, although they do like him, which Louis is glad for. It makes sense — Zayn likes doing certain things with the kids (beach walks, sailing, hiking) and not a lot of the more pedestrian things kids often want to do on weekends (go to loud, germy, crowded places and be around loads of people). So Harry has been escorting them alone a lot more often lately. Last month he brought Amir to a birthday party at a skate park, then chatted up his friends’ mums and dads and nannies, who were of course all very charmed by him.

There’s nothing Louis can do, anyway. He can’t say to Harry, “Can you be annoying and sort of mean to my kids, so they don’t like you?” He usually confides in Liam, who always reassures him that he is deeply beloved and Harry could not, and would not, ever take his place in their hearts. Then he asks if Louis wants a blowjob.

But _stepdad_ doesn’t feel as remote to Louis as it does to Liam, or to Zayn. They don’t get it. They only ever just had their dads. Even though Liam’s own daughter has begun clinging to Louis like he’s a surrogate mum, he still turns a willfully blind eye to the idea of biological estrangement.

A serious fear of Louis’ is that either Mia or Amir will at some point during their fast-approaching teen years turn their backs on him, or get fed up with sharing a house with two rambunctious little boys, and ask to go live with Zayn and Harry. He can vividly imagine that happening, and so he does, often. He’s not stupid — he knows Amir is pretty tired of the twins already, and despite that he’s as loving and attentive as he possibly can be, he can only do so much. He’s just human.

And it’s as if Harry somehow _isn’t_ — like the boy Louis was so close to fifteen years ago has been replaced by a superior and alien version. This Harry would never fall over hugging him in an airport hallway.

Louis watches the four of them go, Harry and his abs taking up the rear like a sheepdog. He _is_ glad that Harry seems to like his kids so much — that he likes kids in general. Having an extra babysitter around, an extra person to love your children and teach them things and be a role model, it’s priceless, Louis knows. He is grateful for it, he really is. It’s just the raw, insecure little part of his heart gets so loud sometimes.

“You don’t want to swim, Zayn?” Louis says, turning to him.

Zayn shakes his head. “I want to shower. Maybe I’ll go down later to get some sun… how crowded is it on the deck?”

“It’s mostly rich pensioners,” Louis says. “But a lot of them. It’s rich pensioner vacation season.”

Zayn blows out a breath. “Yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and avoid that,” he says. He gives Louis a companionable pat on the back, and to Louis’ surprise, gives Liam one on the shoulder, too. “Laters, then.”

“Nah, we’ll walk you up,” Louis says. “I’ve got to try to make my nose look presentable.”

“Probably best to ask Lottie,” Liam says.

“Aw, I don’t want to make her work when she’s on vacation. I can put a bit of concealer on myself, no worries. I’m assuming one of the three of youse has some?”

“I have some,” Liam admits.

“Va-ain,” Louis crows. “You vain old man.”

“I get dark circles!”

“Harry definitely has some, too,” Zayn says. “Speaking of, erm… five of us… Niall’s coming, right?”

“‘Course,” Louis says. “I think his flight was due right after yours, actually.”

“Oh,” Zayn says. “Good.” They all stop in front of the elevators, and he leans out to punch the button. “Haven’t seen him since, ahh…”

He stares into space, going silent, then lifts an eyebrow and shakes his head.

“No idea,” Zayn concludes.

“Probably Amir’s birthday,” Louis helps him. “He was in town, he stopped by. Remember?”

“Did I actually talk to him?”

“Mate, I dunno, I don’t keep track of your social interactions.”

Zayn laughs. “Be nice to see him, then.”

“I’m sure he’ll be pleased to hear we fucked on a golf course the night before our wedding,” Louis says. “Or he’ll think we desecrated it and have Harry go sage it, I dunno.”

Liam laughs harder at this than Zayn does, though he manages a chuckle.

“It’s been nice to see everyone,” Liam says breezily, as they step into the elevator, getting swallowed up in its shimmering mirrored walls. “It really gets so much harder after you have kids. Great to have you and Harry here… I know you’re both busy.”

It’s an olive branch to Zayn; Louis hopes he takes it.

Zayn does. “I’m always happy to get away from the shit show,” he says. “But I think Harry’s got more claim to the busy title than me.”

“He usually manages to make it to things, though,” Louis says. “He’s good about that.”

Zayn nods, and rubs at the inner corner of his eye. “Lot better than me,” he says. “He kicks my arse about it, like.”

They arrive on the fifth floor, and go their separate ways down the hall with a wave.

Back in their room, Liam sits Louis on the bed facing their window, then spreads the curtains so he can look at his face with as much natural light as possible. “Alright,” he murmurs, studying his nose. “What can we do here…”

“Can I shave first? We both need to shave.”

“Nooo, sit still, lemme figure this out.”

His dark eyes get soft when they concentrate like this. Louis loves looking at him when he’s very serious about something, especially if it’s something silly.

“I love you,” he murmurs, for no particular reason.

Liam smiles at him. “I love you too, sweetheart.”

“I’m looking forward to marryin’ you.”

“Me too.”

“And the food. And the cake.” He and Liam have been on a little finish-line diet the last two weeks before the wedding, and it’s been miserable. He never wants to look at a courgette again.

“Reliably the best part,” Liam agrees. “Well, and the toasts should be funny.”

“Yeah, we only have to sit through twelve thousand.”

“But it’s just our favorite people roasting us in a nice way, what could be better?”

“I guess it’s not that bad,” Louis admits. “I’m sure I’ll cry, honestly.”

“I’ll cry too. Keep you company.”

“You don’t tend to cry as often as me, though.”

Liam smiles and starts dabbing the concealer stick gently onto his nose. “I’ll rub jalapeños in my eyes or somethin’.”

“Well, that’ll certainly take the attention off me.”

They both laugh. Liam picks up one of those foam eggs and starts dabbing at what he applied.

“Um,” Louis says, going cross-eyed looking the hot pink hunk of foam. “You’ve brought one of them foamy bits, have you?”

“Beauty blender,” Liam explains.

“You know what it’s _called_? And why’s it an egg, aren't they usually sticks?”

“Hush! I’m usin’ a specialized tool, alright? Anything worth doing is worth doing right.”

He dabs some more in silence.

Suddenly there are several loud bangs on the door, making them both jump. Louis assumes it’s one of the kids, having forgotten something, but then Liam goes to answer the knock and shouts, “Oi!”

“Oi!” Niall shouts back.

“Niall!” Louis cries in delight, whipping around, leaping up, and running over to go tackle him onto the hotel room floor.

Niall groans in pain, and they roll around together, laughing and slapping each other on the back and arms.

“When’d you lot get in?” Louis says, staggering to his feet and offering him a hand up. Niall pops to his feet and turns to Liam, who wraps him up in a bear hug; they sway back and forth together before separating with a laugh.

“Just now,” Niall says. He’s tanned, and a little sunburned. “Dropped my bags off, dropped Win off, then came to say hi. Also, just ran into Zayn in the hallway, by the by. He looked as cheerful as usual.”

“You been at the beach? You’re tan.”

“Yeah, me and the missus just had a couple weeks in the Galápagos.”

“For what?” Liam says.

Niall shrugs. “For nothin’, just wanted to go.”

“See, that’s what people without kids get to do,” Louis says to Liam.

Liam sighs. “I know.”

Louis reaches over to him and snatches the piece of foam out of his hand. “Niall, tell me, d’you know what the foam egg’s called? Like the proper name for it?”

Niall glances at it. “Yeah, beauty blender.”

“Ha!” Liam crows, grabbing it back from Louis.

“Are you doin’ each other’s makeup, then?” Niall says, having a seat on the bed, grinning.

“Actually, sort of,” Liam says. “I’m covering up Louis’ nose bruises. You want anything, a beer or a water or something?”

“Beer sounds great,” Niall says, and Liam goes off to rummage in the little fridge. “What, you hurt your face during your madcap sex escapade on the golf course?”

Louis cracks up. “How the fuck have you heard about that already?”

“Harry texted me,” Niall says, accepting the IPA Liam hands him and taking a long swig. “Very disappointed to hear you’ve desecrated the lands of my people.”

“Ohhh, fuck off, I _knew_ you’d say that.”

“You know, I was gonna try to get a tee time tomorrow morning,” Niall says, pretending at being gravely serious. “And now, y’know, I can’t risk it, stepping into a patch of God knows what. Would throw off m’whole game.”

Louis sits down next to him, roughly bumping shoulders with him. “So, if you’re such a beauty expert, tell us, has Liam done an alright job here?”

Niall squints at his face, licking beer foam off his upper lip. “Nah,” he says.

“What!” Liam cries in offense.

“You covered the bruise, but it’s still a bit swollen,” Niall says to him. “You’ve got to contour. Lou’s got that delicate wee nose, you can’t just smear a big glob of concealer on it the way you’ve done.”

“I dunno contouring,” Liam says fretfully. “I’ve only ever covered things.”

“I’ve got a _what_?” Louis interrupts.

Niall winks at him. “Payno, have you got an eyebrow pencil with you, lad?”

Liam hesitates. “Yes,” he admits.

Louis lights up with amusement. “ _Payn-_ o!”

“I like to look handsome at my wedding!” he defends himself. “It’s just little things! Filling in my eyebrows, doing my dark circles, hey? We’ve all done it, we all wear it on stage, on TV…”

“Bring it here,” Niall says, extending his hand.

Liam goes off to the bathroom in a huff while Louis tries not to laugh. When he comes back and thrusts the pencil into Niall’s palm, Louis says, “Sweetheart, it’s not the makeup, it’s how sneaky you’re being about it.”

“‘Cos I knew you’d take the piss!”

“I just think you’re perfectly handsome the way you are! It’s not like I’ve never had no brow gel on. Actually, I’d like to have some on, today. We are being photographed an awful lot.”

Liam squints at him. “Is that sincere?”

“Ye-es!”

“Hey, no bickerin’,” Niall interrupts. “This is your day to be all lovey and goopy with each other, no piss-taking.”

“What’s the fun in that?” Louis says, grinning at Liam, who grins back at him.

Niall takes the foam egg from Liam as well. He uses the pencil to make little notches on the sides of Louis’ nose, blends them in, examines his work, then repeats the process.

Liam bends over beside Niall, watching his work with a curious look. “You’re actually not bad at this, mate,” he says.

“Cheers,” Niall says. “See, what it is, is, when Win broke her shoulder last year I had to do her makeup for a month. Even did it for the Brits.”

“Wow,” Liam says. “A real Renaissance man.”

Niall caps the brow pencil. “Does it really look alright?”

“It looks quite natural,” Liam says. “You can’t really tell there’s swelling.”

Louis smiles. “You’re gonna give Lottie a run for her money,” he says. “Better watch out.”

“Oh, shit,” Niall says amiably. “Please beg her for leniency, I don’t want my kneecaps broken by any Tommos.”

“I’ll put in a good word, aye.”

“Would you even notice if your kneecaps were broken, Niall?” Liam jokes. “Be business as usual, I think.”

“Good point. Advise her to go for my shins.”

Louis pops to his feet and straightens his shirt, ignoring the impulse to rub at his nose. “Niall, hey hey, come say hi to the babies with us.”

Niall claps his hands together. “Love to.”

Liam winks at Louis. “Couldn’t last the full two hours, huh?”

Louis shoots him a look as he’s pulling his Vans on. “They’re little babies, alright? They need me to check in, they need a cuddle from Dad. I don’t make the rules.”

“He doesn’t make the rules, apparently,” Liam says to Niall.

“Oh, no, never,” Niall says, grinning.

“And the both of you can just fuck right off, frankly.”

*

The entire day of the wedding. Mia can’t seem to sit still. She makes friends with a group of kids at the pool and challenges them to swimming races through the lazy river, races Amir up and down the beach when they get hauled out to a remote cove to take group family photos, plays soccer on the beach with her dad and Niall while the guests do pre-drinks in a tent before the ceremony, then spends hours dancing at the reception after dinner.

At first it’s just a fun game, just her being rambunctious for the pure sake of it, but as the wedding wears on, she realizes she’s full of a panicky inertia that won’t let her rest. She doesn’t know what will happen if she sits still, but she’s scared of it.

It finally happens around ten, when Amir and Sunday have gone up to bed, and she realizes all the adults around her are drunk and impossible to talk to. Mia keeps going up to familiar faces, and they coo over her or put a hand on her shoulder, but they’re lost to alcohol: not capable of paying attention to her, or noticing that something is wrong. Just slurring, laughing.

She wants Louis, but every time she sees him he’s at that little center table with Liam, surrounded by crowds of people, or dancing with him for the sake of the photographer, or something.

It’s Zayn she keeps looking for. He doesn’t drink, and he’d be happy to sit with her away from the throngs of people. But he keeps slipping out of view like a black cat into shadows, ducking outside onto the patio of the massive ballroom to smoke.

So Mia goes out in the little hall where the coat check is, trying to breathe despite hot anxiety crawling up into her heart and cheeks like an evil vine. She sits down on the massive staircase, her sunny yellow dress fanning out around her, and starts to cry quietly. No one’s out here; maybe the coat check girl is also now drunk and useless. She fancies herself a sad little princess, abandoned to the rough seas of her inner turmoil.

She isn’t a princess, though. She’s too much of a tomboy. She spits and yells and gets in fights, she doesn’t sit nice or know how to curtsy, like Sunday does. Is it because she doesn’t have a mum? For the first time that she can remember, she aches a little for not having one. She has so many aunts, and they’ve helped her learn how to be a girl, but maybe she’ll never be elegant and poised. Maybe she’ll never learn how to calm down.

Sunday’s mum is elegant, and beautiful, even though she’s chilly and remote. And everyone always comments on how polite and quiet Sunday is; they’ve been doing it all weekend. People never say that about Mia. Maybe if she had a mum, they would.

She’s deep into her cry, having buried her face in her knees pathetically, when she feels a hand on her back.

Expecting Zayn, Mia looks up. It’s Louis.

“C’mere,” he says kindly, scooping her up and bringing her into his arms with practiced ease, hugging her tight. To her relief, he barely seems drunk. “What’s wrong, love?”

“I don’t know.” She sniffs, feeling stupid. “I’m just really tired,” she adds, her voice cracking.

“I know. I figured you were going to run yourself out of steam at some point tonight.” Louis strokes her hair.

Mia cries more, wiping at her eyes. Louis fishes a handkerchief from his pocket to hand her. “I feel like a stupid baby,” she says tearily.

“You’re allowed to be a baby sometimes,” he says.

“No,” she cries.

“Yes you are. I give you permission.”

Mia weeps into his chest for a while, and he continues to pet her head. She suddenly feels terribly guilty for her brief moment of betrayal in wishing for a mom; she doesn’t want a mom, she wants Louis. No one loves her the way he does. He always says he thinks he wished her into existence, that he needed her so much it made her real, and that feels true.

“You’re allowed to have sort of complicated feelings about me getting married again,” Louis says in a soft voice. “Not saying you do, but if you did, that would be understandable.”

“No,” Mia says, sniffing, even though she isn’t sure if she does or not.

She hears a patio door open, then footsteps on marble and Zayn’s voice worriedly saying, “Oi, what’s up?”

“Nothing,” Louis whispers to him. “She’s just a little overtired, I think. I let her stay up too late, and it was a long day for them.”

“Oh, Yasmeen…” The familiar, comforting reek of cigarette smoke reaches her nostrils. Zayn’s weight settles beside them on the stairs, and he starts petting her hair too. “It’s alright.”

She’s mostly crying out of relief now, and it feels good, like she’s purging the evil thing through her tears. She can feel Louis’ phone buzzing in his pocket, against her cheek: _buzz buzz, buzz buzz, buzz buzz._ But he doesn’t move to check it.

“Lou,” Zayn whispers, “if you’ve got to head back, I can sit with her. I was headin’ up to bed soon anyway, I can take her.”

“Not if she needs me,” Louis says.

“I’m okay,” Mia sniffles. “You can go.”

His finger strokes a strand of her hair back and hooks it behind her ear. “You sure, lovey?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” Louis presses a kiss to her head, then gently deposits her on the stairs. Zayn wraps an arm around her shoulders. “Night, Mims. I’ll see you in the morning. Love you.”

“Love you, Dad,” she says, looking up and wiping her eyes as Louis stumbles tipsily down the stairs and heads back into the ballroom, straightening his tie. There’s a roar of party sound as he opens the door, then it fades again as it swings shut behind him.

Zayn takes over stroking her hair. She smells a puff of artificial sweetness, and turns to look at him. He’s vaping now.

“Sorry,” he says.

“No, it’s okay,” Mia says.

Zayn takes another hit, exhaling a cloud.

“What flavor is that?” she says curiously.

Zayn laughs. “Cucumber.”

“It smells good.”

“Yeah.” He waves his hand in the air, dissipating the smoke. “You probably shouldn’t be breathin’ that in.”

Mia leans her head against his shoulder. She’s comforted by the smell of him, the distinctive blend of hair gels and lotions and colognes he uses. He’s always minty or spicy or something like that, smells that tickle her nose.

“Is it sad for you, being at Dad’s wedding?” she says.

Zayn inhales and doesn’t answer for a while. Down the hall, the coat check girl returns to her post, smoothing her black vest down. She has a gold nametag and a little headset on; she looks tired and bored. Mia wonders what it would be like to have to work at a place like this and do things for fancy rich people all day. She feels sorry for her. Rich people can be very cranky.

“Not sad so much as just, ah.” Zayn goes quiet. “I dunno. I’m happy for Louis, I really am. But you know how it is. Everyone here’s gonna be, like, super aware that I’m the ex. Makes it sort of awkward. Plus, everyone’s drinking, and I don’t drink.”

“I hate that everyone’s drinking,” Mia admits. “It makes them loud and stupid.”

“Honestly, I proper agree,” Zayn says. “Nothing like getting sober to make you realize how annoying drunk people are. Which is especially bad when you’re English.”

“Why don’t you just hang out with Harry?”

“Harry likes to drink and dance and chat,” Zayn says. “He knows I’ve got my limit… we don’t crowd each other, me an’ him. We know we’re fairly different people.”

“Like Dad and Liam?”

“... Rrrright, aye. Like your dad and Liam. It’s good to find someone that complements you.”

“Compliments you?”

“Complements with two e’s,” he explains. “Means you go together well.”

“Dad?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t like Liam, do you?”

Zayn lets out a delicate sigh. “I think Liam’s a good partner for your dad,” he says. “He loves him loads.”

“But what about how you feel?”

“Doesn’t matter how I feel.”

“He’s our stepdad now, he lives with us. How can’t it matter?”

“Look,” Zayn says, “the shit I’ve got with Liam… you’ll find out all about it when you’re older, I’m sure. It played out sort of publicly, which, erm, was partly my fault. But, me and him personally, the conflict we’ve got, yeah, I‘ve got problems wiv ‘im. I think he tends to play the innocent card a bit, tends to present himself as this noble guy, but he’s got a calculatin’ side. But that’s my personal, private shit with him, that’s between us. I’m not worried about him being good to you kids, or to Louis. We’re all flawed.”

Zayn is being more honest with her than he usually is. He must be in a funny kind of mood. Mia thinks about what he said, her tired brain buzzing with curiosity, then nods and sniffles some more. She blows her nose into the handkerchief Louis left. “Hey,” she says, her voice small. “Am I okay the way I am?”

Zayn looks at her in confusion. “Of course, love. What d’you mean?”

She opens and closes her mouth, afraid she’s going to start crying again. “Just… when you and Dad yell at me for being rude, or talking too much, and my teachers get mad at me for that stuff, or not doing what I’m supposed to do… or when my friends get mad at me ‘cos I hurt their feelings, or I start trouble…” Fat tears leak down her cheeks. “I’m not bad, right? Am I bad?”

“No, no,” Zayn says, laughing softly, wrapping an arm around her. “You aren’t bad at all, no. You’re wonderful. You’re just…” He sighs. “You’re the sort of person that’s going to prefer being an adult to a kid, that’s all. You just don’t like playin’ by the rules. Neither me or Louis did, either.”

“And that’s okay?”

“It’s just who you are, love… it’s life. You’ll make mistakes, and learn, and make more mistakes, and learn some more. At the end of the day you’ve got a kind heart, and that’s all that matters.”

He reaches up and thumbs her tears away from her cheeks. She hiccups.

“I’m mean too, though,” she admits. “Sometimes I say mean things, or I feel mean.”

She’s scared to admit this out loud, but Zayn just laughs, like it isn’t a big deal. “Me too.”

That makes her feel better.

“I always understood you,” Zayn says. “Even when you were little, a little toddler, I got you. We’d bring you places, me and Louis, and you’d get worn out like kids do, start cryin’ or whatever, and Louis’d get exasperated, but I got it. I didn’t want to be wherever we were neither. Honestly, I was jealous of you for getting to throw a tantrum about it.”

Mia laughs.

“Wanna go upstairs and watch a movie?” Zayn suggests.

“You don’t mind leaving the party?”

“Babydoll, I’ve wanted to leave this party since it started.”

Mia hiccups some more. “Okay.”

Zayn gets to his feet with a groan, then takes her by the hand and starts to lead her down the stairs. “What movie you wanna watch?”

“Something funny?”

“You got it.”

*

Around one in the morning the dance floor has been deserted by all but the drunkest guests, and it’s started raining again. The band they hired is still going strong, though, and they’re playing some nondescript swing music as Liam and Louis sway back and forth on the dance floor.

They’re not really dancing, more just drunkenly clinging to each other. Liam has his arm around Louis’ waist, and Louis has his head pressed to Liam’s chest, one hand tucked up under the lapel of his jacket, the other resting on his hip. Liam keeps giving him lazy kisses him on the head. His breath stinks sweetly of whiskey.

“I wanna go to bed,” Louis murmurs.

“It’s only one,” Liam says, his voice hoarse. “C’mon.”

“Yeah, but we’ve got to be up for the big family brunch tomorrow.”

“Cancel it. Tell everyone to grab some French toast sticks out the dining room and come up to our room, we can chill.”

Louis laughs. “Fine by me.”

“So,” Liam says, trailing his fingers through Louis’ hair. “Now that it’s official… you bored with me?”

“Yeah, a bit. Let’s get divorced so we can get married again.”

He laughs. “Okay.”

Louis squeezes him tighter. “Nah, not bored. Happy.”

“Yeah? Even though I fucked up our vows?”

It’s Louis’ turn to laugh. Liam had insisted he didn’t need his reading glasses for the vows, but then he skipped over an entire paragraph by mistake and had to go back and read it after he’d finished, making a complete jumble of them. He managed to make it funny, though.

“Yeah,” Louis says sweetly. “I told you I was marryin’ you for your looks, didn’t I?”

“Heyyy…”

Louis briefly lifts his head to scan the crowd. It looks like Oli and Calvin are organizing a drinking game with a pack of lads, but mostly everyone is back at their own tables and chatting, or outside smoking, or they’ve gone to bed. It’s nice to feel like no one is looking at them.

“Thanks for doing dumb shit with me last night,” he says, squeezing Liam on the hip.

“Thanks for making me do dumb shit,” Liam says, rubbing his thumb through Louis’ hair over his ear, where it’s a bit sweaty. “Got me out of my head.”

“Why were you in your head, love?”

“I don’t know,” Liam says, shrugging. “Not in a bad way. Not like cold feet or anythin’. Just thinking about life, and things.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I dunno. Like what I want to have done, in life. Like, now that we’re married, that’s a sort of major thing crossed off my list, y’know? The plan is to be with you forever, and we already have a family together. So that’s set. So I was thinking, like, what kind of dad and stepdad do I want to be? And I’m working on that bit. That, you sort of figure out as you go, but I wanted to tell your kids what was on my mind. And then, y’know, what’s on my career bucket list? People I’d like to work with, venues and festivals I wanna play, music I wanna make. And then it all gets sort of like… y‘know. Can’t think too hard about all that, life and things. Gets a bit scary.”

Louis kisses Liam’s chest. He can hear some raucous noise coming from Oli’s table now, but for once he’s too tired to even lift his head in curiosity. “I understand.”

“But I’m happy too,” Liam clarifies. “Extremely happy. I was just thinking. And you dug me out of the thinky-hole.”

“Aye, I’m good at that.”

“You are! You always cheer me up. Or inject a bit of reality.”

“Well, you do the same for me.”

“That’s why we got ma-aried,” Liam sings.

“That’s it, that’s the only reason.”

“Yep,” Liam says, and they both start laughing. “Not attracted to each other, nothing else in common.”

“No, I’ve been meaning to tell you, I don’t like you at all. I never have. Not on X-Factor, and not now.”

“Oh yeah? Well, I never liked you either.”

Louis grins. “Had me fooled.”

“I’m a very talented actor. Haven’t you seen me in our perfume commercials?”

“Stuck with each other anyway now, though.”

“Unfortunately.” Liam squeezes him tighter and kisses him on the head again.

“You are my favorite person, though,” Louis says. “Isn’t that funny? I never get tired of you.”

“That _can’t_ be true.”

“It’s mostly true.”

“You get tired of me every day.”

“And you me!”

“Yeah, but I always want to talk to you,” Liam says. “Even when you’re driving me crazy. Oh, I guess that’s what you meant, yeah?”

“Yes, love, that’s what I meant.”

Liam laughs. “Me too, then.”

Louis closes his eyes, listening to the band and the sound of shouting laughter from their guests.

“What’s happening over there?” he murmurs.

“I think our boys were trying to play fuzzy duck, and it turned into duck duck goose, and Frankie tripped and cracked his head off a table.”

“Oof, he alright?”

“Oli’s putting ice on it.”

“Good.”

Liam takes Louis’ hand in his and starts swaying a little more than he was, giving a limp attempt at dancing. Louis laughs. He’s warm and loose from the alcohol, and he doesn’t want to do anything but lean on Liam.

“No sex tonight probably,” Liam says regretfully. “I’ve definitely got whiskey dick. And I’m so sleepy.”

“Same. Quickie tomorrow morning, maybe? It’s already tomorrow anyway.”

“It is,” Liam agrees. “It is tomorrow.”

They fall quiet, continuing to sway a tiny bit. Behind them, they can hear the comforting sound of their friends crying with laughter.


	3. harry and zayn

MALIBU, AUGUST 7, 2027

Zayn mulls it over for less than a week.

That’s all the time he needs, really. They’ve talked marriage before — Zayn wants to get married again, but Harry said he just didn’t see the point, and that their relationship was deeper than that anyway. At the time, Zayn understood. Harry’s last marriage was lonely and traumatic, plus he’s a child of divorce. It’s all too tainted for him.

But then during their first consult at her office, their adoption attorney had said, “They will, unfortunately, definitely give preference to a married couple. So if you guys had already had any plans to get married… moving that timeline up would help.”

Harry had shifted in his leather armchair and said nothing, but Zayn said, “Right,” and filed this away.

After a couple days he’s decided: yeah, fucking propose to him. Sure. Why not? Third time’s the charm, maybe.

He didn’t buy a ring or anything. He figured if Harry said yes, he could pick out his own ring after. Zayn’s too worn down to go to all that trouble and then have to return it if the answer was no. Plus, that would be fucking embarrassing, wouldn’t it? Going back to the jeweler with your unused ring. Fuck that.

It’s six weeks to the day after Harry’s third miscarriage when Zayn finally works up the nerve.

“I dunno if I can go through this again,” he’d told Zayn that day at the hospital, his face dead serious, and Zayn nodded, even though he was heartbroken over it. Ever since then Harry has thrown himself desperately into making sure they were able to adopt this little baby. He cried silently when they left her after her first visit, tears just streaming down his cheeks as he wrung his ringed hands in his lap. (Zayn always drives, now, because Harry has been prone to an intense kind of distractibility lately). “She needs me,” he keeps telling Zayn. Zayn knows she does, but he thinks what Harry’s really saying is _I need her_.

That alone is enough reason to get married, right? If it’ll help the adoption, that should outweigh Harry’s squeamishness about the institution of marriage. 

Zayn’s still anxious the whole evening before he proposes, though. He keeps wanting to call it off. No ring or anything, right, so why not just chicken out? But he keeps looking at Harry — across the car, across their table at Nobu, across the couch — and his heart swells with love every time. Harry’s so shattered, but still gentle. Zayn hears the broken rasp in his voice as he quietly thanks a waiter, sees the faint stirs of wonder on his face when he glances out his window to see a purple sunset spreading over the ocean, and he wants to do something, anything. As shitty as he can be at relationships, Zayn thinks he’s got the grand gesture down. So whatever. Even if Harry says no, he’ll appreciate being asked.

Zayn takes him on a walk down to the coast around ten. Lights from his house and the neighbors’ spill over the beach, making the sand glow gold and the surf shine white, but where the ocean and the sky meet is inky black. They sit around a firepit he had installed a few months ago, and Zayn works to start a fire as Harry shrugs a fleece blanket over his shoulders.

Zayn glances up once the fire is lit; it lights Harry’s face from below, shadows flickering and dancing on his chest and chin. Harry meets his eyes, his own green ones glowing.

“Hey,” Zayn says. He toys with the pendant hanging against his chest. “Sorta wanted to ask you something.”

Harry smiles and inclines his head. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You look nervous.”

“Well…”

Zayn gets up and goes over to him, kneeling before him in the sand. Harry turns, cocking his head.

“I know you like, said you didn’t want to get married again,” Zayn says. “And I get that, like. I do. But, uh. Babe, I’d really like to marry you. I always wanted to marry you. When we were kids, I always thought — I figured I would, someday. I just always thought we’d end up together. And I know it got all fucked up, ‘cos, y’know. I was engaged to somebody else, and then like, I got somebody else pregnant, and I married him —”

“I was there,” Harry gently reminds him.

“Right. And you married someone else, too, but, like, shit, Harry, I don’t… you say you don’t want to do it again, or it doesn’t mean anything, but it means something to me. I wanna… I wanna do it right.” Zayn pauses, then exhales. “This is all coming out wrong.”

“It’s okay.” Harry takes his hand and squeezes it. “Go on.”

“Um, I just…” Zayn swipes his hair back from his face. “Everything we’ve gone through this year, everything we’ve gone through period, it makes me want to do something big like this. It makes me wanna give you some kind of proof, or promise, or somethin’. I love you so much, and I just wanna do this. I want to, y’know… get up in front of some people, even if it’s just our mums, and say I’ll take care of you forever. You don’t even have to do anything, mate, honest, I’ll — you don’t even ‘ave to show up, I’ll just do it all myself —”

Harry laughs at this, squeezing his hand again. Zayn moves closer to him and bends over him, laying his head in Harry’s lap. Harry strokes his hair with delicate brushes of his fingers.

“And I wanna do it for the right reasons,” Zayn murmurs. “I want to do it right this time. It’s not fair we’ve been married to other people, I hate that. ‘Cos it’s you I want to get old with. I know it’s hard sometimes, we don’t always, like, communicate right... But that’s almost why I want to do this, y’know? I want to make a promise to you I’m gonna work on that shit, I’m not gonna cut and run on you. I wanna marry you really bad. And I want to adopt our daughter with you, and honestly, even if you don’t want to go in for the marriage thing again, at least let’s do it to shore up our chances on that, before our home study.” His voice breaks and gets breathy. “‘Cos I have to give you a baby somehow. I know how much you want a baby, mate, and you’d be such a good dad. You’d do it with your whole heart. I have to do this for you.”

Harry strokes his hair harder, cradling his head. “Zayn…” His voice is very tender.

Zayn gently bites down on Harry’s thigh through the fabric of his jeans, making him laugh again. “Wot?”

“‘Course I’ll marry you.”

Zayn lifts his head. “Really?”

Harry nods, smiling.

He laughs. “Why’d you make me do the whole speech, then?”

“Well, I quite liked the speech...”

Zayn gets to his feet, then, because his knees hurt. He perches on the bench beside Harry, now feeling the warm flicker of the fire again and the eye-watering puffs of smoke. Harry reaches up and strokes his hair some more, looking very fond of him.

“If we’re doing it for the baby, we should do it soon,” Harry murmurs. “Home study’s in September.”

“I had that thought, yeah. Wanna just elope, do the actual wedding later?”

“No, no,” Harry says. “I don’t like eloping, I think it’s tacky… and everyone’s going to ask if I’m pregnant, or joke and be cheeky about it, and I can’t — I can’t right now.”

“No, I get it.”

“We can just do it really small, next week or something,” Harry says. “I mean, it’s a second wedding… I don’t really want anyone there but family anyway. Maybe a couple other people. So your kids, obviously, and I suppose that includes Louis by default...”

“I can just have it be my kids,” Zayn says. “I don’t think Louis’d mind skipping our wedding.”

“But that’s so odd to not have him, if his kids with you are there. I mean they’re wee, still.”

“They can fly unaccompanied, wouldn’t be the end of the world.”

“But… we went to his and Liam’s wedding, y’know?”

“I didn’t particularly _want_ to, though.”

Zayn thinks briefly of his own wedding to Louis — the courthouse one, not the one they staged for the sake of their families. It had felt magical, not quite real. California in the springtime, the feeling that anything was possible, the whirlwind of going from two angry and estranged boys to a couple in love and heading up a family of four. Louis kept giving him sidelong glances, sparkly-eyed and smirking, cupping his hands maternally to his middle like he was poking fun at the nature of the proceedings.

“And then, if we invite Louis, we have to invite Liam, which means Niall will be gutted if we don’t invite him too,” Harry says. “So maybe we should exclude Louis. See, this is already too complicated.”

“Babe,” Zayn says. “Let’s just say family and whatever friends are in London at the time, alright? I mean, it’s spur of the moment, right? So no hard feelings for anyone who can’t make it, ‘cos we’ll have a party here at the house at some point, like a reception-type joint, everyone can wish us well then.”

Harry nods. “That’s simpler,” he says.

“We’ll keep it dead simple, I swear.”

“Okay,” he says in a little voice.

“Okay,” Zayn repeats, squeezing his thigh.

“Lately, I dunno… everything feels like too much.”

Zayn studies him. Harry’s gaze has torn away from him; it’s directed out at the horizon now. “I know that feeling.”

Harry inhales and makes a face. “I feel crappy,” he says.

“What, about getting married?”

“No, no. Physically, I meant.”

“Well, you’ve been through loads of shit lately,” Zayn says. “What d’you mean though, specifically?”

“Nauseous, mostly,” Harry says. “My stomach’s just unsettled.” Zayn hesitates, and Harry reads his mind, adding: “I’m not pregnant.”

“You sure?”

“Don’t,” Harry snaps at him.

“Sweetheart…”

“I don’t want to be,” Harry interrupts. “I don’t. I don’t even want to talk about it.”

“I know, I’m sorry.”

Harry reaches up and rubs at his left eye with a lazy knuckle.

Zayn aches with grief. “Hey,” he says. “I love you so much.”

“I love you too.”

“Wanna put that blanket down in the sand there?”

Harry glances back at him finally, rolling his eyes and cocking a lazy grin at him. “How about we go in the nice air-conditioned house, with the comfortable bed?”

“I’m alright with that,” Zayn agrees.

WOLSTANTON, AUGUST 14, 2027

So, they get married in Gemma’s backyard.

Louis and Liam do agree to come, making a plan to drop their toddlers off with family on the way so they can escort the older ones (sans Sunday, who’s off somewhere with her mother, or something — Zayn wasn’t listening that closely).

He and Harry are at the breakfast table working out details when Zayn calls Louis to invite him, placing the phone on speaker between them and giving Harry a conspiratorial look as he does. Harry sets down his own phone to listen, clasping his hands together and resting his cheek on them like he’s nervous.

“‘Ullo?” Louis says.

“Hey,” Zayn says. “You got a moment to talk?”

“Ah… yeah, mate, what’s up?”

“Me and Harry, um, we decided we’d like to get married. We’re gonna do a quickie wedding next week, back home.”

“Oh! Oh. Wow. Um — congrats, mate, that’s lovely. Really glad to hear it.”

“Thanks, thanks.”

“Any reason for the rush?”

Zayn exhales. “Nah, not really. Just Harry doesn’t want to make a big to-do of it.”

He doesn’t mention the adoption thing, because Harry has been very superstitious on the topic lately, making Zayn knock wood whenever he talks about bringing the baby home. After he says it, Harry humorously mouths _to-doooo._

“We’d like the kids to come, if that’s possible,” Zayn adds. “It’s a Saturday.”

Louis is silent for a second. “You taking your weekend custody back, then?”

He sounds a little peeved about it. Zayn knows he really sort of fucked up his co-parenting this year; Louis’ been very understanding about their pregnancy losses, but he seems to be running out of patience with Zayn’s neglect of his living children. Zayn can’t really blame him. It sucks, and he knows the kids are pissed. Plus, Louis has two pain in the ass little boys running around now, so having their older kids around 24/7 (when said kids are plenty surly about the situation to begin with) probably isn’t ideal.

“Oh,” Zayn says. “Guess I could — guess we could start back on that, yeah.”

“Alright. Good. I’ll see if I can get them off school Friday and arrange a flight on this short notice, and if Payno’s not busy.”

“So you’d like to come, then?”

“Obviously I’m going to accompany me children to England,” Louis says.

“You’ve flown them here unaccompanied minors sometimes.”

“Once! I did that _once_ , when I had the flu. No, I’ll be there, unless you’d prefer I not come?”

_Told you_ , Zayn mouths at Harry. Out loud he says, “No, the more the merrier. It’s a family thing, right? You’re family.”

“Alright,” Louis says. “I’ll text you.”

“Sounds good. Bye.”

“Bye.”

They ring off.

“Well,” Harry says, picking his own phone back up. “There you are, then.”

“I knew it,” Zayn says, sipping his coffee. “He’d rather suffer through our weddin’ firsthand than have the kids come back and be all chuffed about it. This way he can be a bit of a sourpuss for the whole thing, so they get the point, y’know. Don’t act too cheerful or you’ll miff off Daddy.”

Harry makes a face. “That’s so cynical.”

“That’s just how divorce is.”

“No, no. He knows what we’ve been going through, he won’t be anything but gracious.”

“He’ll be exactly as gracious as he has to be.”

Harry shakes his head. “I don’t think Louis is at all calculated like that. I think he just feels what he feels. Like I said, it’s not exactly fun to go to an ex’s wedding, ‘specially if you’ve got kids together. I mean, you didn’t enjoy it in the reverse, did you?”

“No, and his was a whole massive thing! With all his pain in the arse friends giving me a hard time, and him and Liam moonin’ over each other, you know how they are.”

“Hmm,” Harry says, amusement lighting up his tired and bedraggled face. “Okay.”

“He had our kids be in the wedding party!”

“Amir specifically asked to be,” Harry says gently. “Would you like him to be your best man? I’m sure he’d love to. He worships you.”

Zayn softens at the way Harry says this. “No, that’s alright. It’s just the principle of the thing. You don’t mind having Louis there?”

“Of course not,” Harry says. “He’s my family too. Just ‘cos we don’t get together often to hold hands and skip in the fields doesn’t mean I don’t want to welcome him and his kids into the life I’m making with you.”

Zayn looks down at his tattooed hands, twisting them in his lap and running his fingertip over the ring on his thumb. “Alright.”

“I know what you’re doing, too,” Harry says, fixing him with that owl-eyed laser stare of his. “And I don’t even think you realize you’re doing it. You’re always a bit mean about Louis when you feel guilty... so, I reckon you’re feeling guilty about getting remarried.”

“No,” Zayn protests, but the way his chest gets hot, he knows Harry is right.

“It’s not like you can hide the fact you’re coparenting with him from me, to spare my feelings,” Harry says. “And you don’t need to.”

“I ain’t trying to! I swear! It just feels a bit sensitive right now, y’know? With what we’re going through?” Zayn struggles for the right words. “How am I supposed to not feel like you think I’m a dickhead for having this entire family with someone else, and now we can’t have a kid? Y’know?”

“Zayn,” Harry says quietly. “That’s insane. I don’t think of it like that.”

“Well, I do. I feel like you think that.”

“Your kids exist, alright? They’re here. And they’re incredibly important to you.”

“I know they are.”

“I won’t be this catty stepdad that shuns your family and pretends you’ve got no baggage and no children. If I can’t have babies of my own, then I’d at least like to, y’know… I’d like to be a dad figure to yours.”

He breaks off. Zayn looks back up at him and sees his green eyes are welling with tears. “Oh, babe.”

Harry shakes his head. “I’m fine. I cry at the drop of a hat lately.”

“You’ll be alright this weekend? I know people are gonna ask us questions and shit…”

“I’ll live,” Harry says hoarsely. “I’m tough.”

*

They fly out two days before and spend a couple nights bunking in Gemma’s guest suite. Harry had bought her and Andrew this house as a wedding gift. She protested, of course, but he ignored her protests.

For that reason it seemed fitting to host his own wedding there. He kept his invite list down to his own family and closest friends, just the ones who happened to be in London, and Zayn mostly kept his to family and a few childhood mates. “I forgot how much I’ve pulled away from England,” he admitted when they were texting out invites.

The evening before the wedding, Harry returns from the florist’s with a receipt for bushels and bushels of lavenders and lilacs and cascading orchids, riots of purple that will take over every corner of Gemma’s large, lush backyard. Lavender is his and Zayn’s color; it looks good on both of them. It’s the color of their sheets at the Malibu house.

It’s not quite dark out, but a storm is passing through, so the guest room is already dim and softly gray like it’s night. Zayn’s asleep in the bed, his phone in his hand like he was looking at it when he dozed off. Harry crawls over to him and leans down, kissing him on the cheek.

Zayn stirs. He’s been so tired lately, even though he pretends to Harry like he’s not. This year has taken everything out of them.

“Hi love,” Harry murmurs. “I got the flowers.”

Zayn opens his eyes and looks around blearily. “Wot, you brought them?”

He laughs. “No, they’re delivering them tomorrow. A man in a van.”

“A man in a van,” Zayn repeats sleepily, sort of singing it. He lets his phone slip from his hand.

Harry lies down next to him and cuddles up to him. The house is peacefully quiet, except for Gemma and Andrew moving around upstairs, the washing machine going in the laundry room across the hall, and rain pattering the windows.

“You’re doing okay, right?” he says.

Zayn reaches up and pets his hair, nodding. “Why? I don’t seem it?”

“Just you’ve spent so much time taking care of me…” Harry touches his finger to the dark circles under one of Zayn’s eyes. “And you won’t talk to me about it, but I’ve noticed you switching medications and going to extra meetings and things…”

Zayn clears his throat. “‘S’like… preventative,” he says. “It’s not ‘cos I’m round the twist, it’s so I don't get there.”

“And I’ve been keeping you from your kids.” He says this with great regret.

“You haven’t.”

“I have…”

“I make my own decisions,” Zayn says. “Nobody else does. So, if you think I’ve been a crap dad this summer, then that’s on me, put it on me. Not on yourself.”

“I don’t think you’ve been a crap dad!”

“I’ve barely seen them,” Zayn rasps.

“And like I said, that’s _my_ fault —“

“I don’t want to have this argument again.”

Harry rolls over, lying on his back and staring up at the ceiling.

“Hey,” he says. “Can we talk a bit, about the whole being married thing? Just iron out some terms?”

Next to him, Zayn chuckles softly before settling on his back next to him so they’re shoulder to shoulder. “Some terms?”

“You know,” Harry says. He’s been fatigued lately, and lying here in comfort with Zayn is making his fuzzily warm eyelids want to shut. But he fights that. “Standard contract stuff.”

Zayn leans over and presses a kiss to his cheek, then falls back against the sheets. “Alright, go on.”

“First, I think this one’s a bit relevant, since both of our previous marriages ended with us cheating on our spouses…”

“Ah,” Zayn says, sounding uncomfortable. “I’d argue that we were incompatible wiv those people to begin with.”

“Still,” Harry says. “There was infidelity on our parts.”

“Past performance is no guarantee of future results.”

“That’s about the stock market.”

“What? No, it’s about sports.”

“No, that quote is definitely about the stock market,” Harry says, amused. “Doesn’t really apply to human behavior.”

“You really think I’m gonna cheat on you?” Zayn says, somewhat acidly. He shifts on the bed beside Harry, who reaches down and takes his hand.

“I don’t,” Harry says. “I just want to say that if something were to happen… ‘cos shit happens in life… I’d want to try to work it out.”

“Oh,” Zayn says, and squeezes his hand. “Me too.”

“I don’t want to lose you over a stupid mistake. It took us so long to get here.”

“I agree. I mean, I don’t plan on making any stupid mistakes.”

“I know,” Harry says. “But just in case, I dunno — if we get ten years in, and realize we’re tired of each other physically —“

“We’re like twenty years now, off and on, and I’m not tired of you physically.”

“Can I do my hypotheticals, please? This is going to be an extremely long conversation if I can’t get through my hypotheticals.”

“Alright, alright alright.”

Harry laughs softly. “If we get, let’s say, _forty_ years in, and we’re both like, God, I just want to fuck some random person and get it out of my system, I’m open to that. Or if we want to consider a threesome, or something.”

“Hmm.”

“Trust me, I think that’s a good clause for us to have.”

“Co-signed. Continue.”

Harry clears his throat. “Secondly, I know you don’t love traveling, or being out of the house much,” he says, and Zayn laughs. “But I do.”

“I know, love.”

“So, we compromise? I don’t think we need to be attached at the hip, that’s not us, but I don’t want you to be lonely if I jet off for a weekend. That hasn’t really come up yet, since I was taking some time off and then, ah… been going through this horrible IVF shit. But when I’m back to being myself… you know me, I’m very much my own person. It’s hard for me to be otherwise sometimes.”

“I know who you are,” Zayn says, squeezing his hand again. “Course I want us both to keep having our own space. I don’t want any of the shit that messed with my last marriage.”

“What shit?”

“Oh, y’know…” Zayn heaves a sigh. “I think Louis was more, like — wanting to be attached at the hip.”

Harry experiences a fleeting stab of jealousy at this. “Yeah.”

“And that’s how he is with Liam, so, great for them, I suppose. But, yeah, I feel you on, like — I dunno, just some space doesn’t make me feel insecure, no. I get you’ve got your big career and your Gucci contract and your acting and your music.”

“It’s wrecked a lot of my relationships, though.” Harry drops his voice to humorously intone, “Scheduling conflicts.”

Zayn laughs and shifts on the bed again, then yawns. “Yeah, well,” he says sleepily, “I’ll take it personal and get mardy and throw a little hissyfit, and you’ll get all silent and go meditate, and then we’ll calm down and work it out. I’m not worried.”

“I just don’t want to make you feel alone.”

“You won’t, loves.”

“I felt really alone with Angelos,” Harry admits.

Zayn reaches over and lazily pets him, stroking his arm and chest. “I know.”

“I felt like… d’you remember _Rebecca?”_

“No.”

“You don’t? I made you watch it with me.”

“What was it about?” Harry can hear sleepiness creeping more deeply into Zayn’s voice.

“A couple,” Harry says. “They live in a big house by the sea… in the first act it’s all about how the wife thinks the husband doesn’t really love her, and she’s trying to figure out how to win him over... Can’t believe you don’t remember that movie, it’s pretty memorable.”

“I sort of do,” Zayn says. “But I’m not gonna lie, I’m usually pretty baked when we watch movies together.”

Harry grins. “Yeah, baked and trying to fuck me ten minutes in.”

Zayn rolls over and snuggles up against him, pressing his face into Harry’s shoulder. Harry reaches up and strokes the soft sleekness of his hair.

“I have more,” he murmurs.

“Okay,” Zayn says, his breath hot on Harry’s neck. “‘M listening.”

“I wanna talk about your kids.”

“Mmm.”

“I wanna be involved with them.”

“You are.”

“But I don’t parent them, so much. You don’t really give me the space to. You don’t like to leave me alone with them, you jump in whenever there might be an opening for me to assert myself a bit…” Harry falls quiet. “I dunno. I just want to feel more like a stepdad, once I am one. Not a houseguest.”

“You’ve never been a houseguest,” Zayn mumbles. “C’mon.”

“What if we never have kids of our own? What if we can’t even adopt Naomi?”

Zayn reaches out and grabs his wrist, squeezing it. “We will, alright?”

Hot tears prick painfully at Harry’s eyes.

“Look, I just, like… I don’t like goin’ up against Louis much, and I don’t think it’s a secret that he’s a bit possessive of the kids from you,” Zayn says. “It’s just easier for me to do the parenting when I’ve got them, so they don’t go home and tell him ‘Harry taught me how to ride a bike’ or ‘Harry yelled at me’ or whatever.”

“They already know how to ride bikes,” Harry sniffles, and Zayn laughs. “But like, that’s part of the thing… you just called Louis’ house ‘home’. You’ve got partial custody, you’re their dad too. Our home’s their home too.”

“I know,” Zayn whispers. “Look, besides that… you and him have got that passive-aggressive thing going on about me…”

“So because there’s a bit of tension between me and him, I can’t be trusted with your kids?” Harry says, feeling incredulous.

Zayn shifts, groaning, and presses his forehead to Harry’s shoulder. “I just don’t want to cause problems with him…”

“Well, have you ever even _asked_ him if it’d be a problem if I took more of a parental role? I mean, it’s not like I haven’t, like — I’ve checked on their homework, I’ve gotten them dinner, I’ve made sure they get to bed on time, I’ve done all that! But whenever it’s a little more serious than that, you jump on in — have you ever thought of maybe just hanging back?” Harry trails off, his voice pleading. “We’ve been seriously together for two years now, I think they’ve cottoned on.”

Zayn presses a light kiss to his bicep. “Okay. I’ll be better about that. Sorry.”

More tears leak from Harry’s eyes. “And I can’t imagine Louis being petty or small enough to withhold that from me,” he says. “He knows what we’ve been going through. He knows how badly I want kids. He’s got four, five of his own, he’s exhausted, he _wants_ help. The Louis I know would be a lot more generous than what you’re saying, so honestly, I think it’s just you being afraid of confrontation and using him as a shield.”

Zayn lifts his head, his brow knitting. “Hey…”

“Well, it is,” Harry says. “You keep doing that, it’s not out of bounds to point it out.”

“Look… Alright, I dunno, mate. Maybe it’s me a bit, yeah. I think I sort of partly feel like… ‘shit, I’ve got all this baggage, these kids, and Harry doesn’t.’ It doesn’t feel fair to make you step up and be a dad to someone else’s kids, know what I mean?”

“Zayn,” Harry says, softening. “No, I love your kids.”

“That’s different than being a parent, though.” Zayn ducks his gaze, the dark fringe of his lashes hiding his eyes. “It’s hard… I’m scared, alright? I really upset them, leaving them this whole summer. I dunno how they’re gonna be once I start having them weekends again.”

“Is _that_ what you’re scared about? Is that why you’re all weird and guilty and wanting to blame random things on Louis?”

“It’s scary, mate! I totally neglected them, I dunno if I’ve like, damaged our relationship!” He sounds so pained and guilty, so resignedly disappointed in himself, that it hurts Harry to hear. “I dunno, maybe they like Louis better now, he’s always been better at this, the nurturin’ thing, the maternal instincts shit — I’m feeling like they’re just gonna forget me.”

“Zayn, no, that’s absolutely crazy, mate. They love you so much.”

Zayn scrubs his hand over his face. “I don’t want them to resent you, either.”

“They’re entitled to that,” Harry murmurs. “They’re just kids. Look, I’m in this with you, whatever happens, however hard parenting gets. If they grow up and they start setting fire to our shit and sneaking out and doing drugs in the house, I’ll be a team with you, and a team with Louis, and Liam, and whoever else. Stepparents are a good thing, I promise. They’re somebody extra in your corner to look out for you and love you.”

Zayn still looks morose, so Harry reaches up and strokes his hair.

“What if we finally ‘ave a baby and one of my kids accidentally runs our baby over with their car, or something,” Zayn mumbles. “We wouldn’t survive that. You’d hate me.”

Harry barks out a laugh and grimaces at him. “Is that the type of shit you think about?”

Zayn nods.

“That’s so, like… not even in the realm of things I’m worried about, it’s so unlikely. For starters, they won’t even be driving for five more years. Look, your kids are lovely, alright? They’re already good older siblings to the twins. They’re maybe a bit headstrong, but they’re sweet and smart. I love you partly ‘cos you are a good dad, y’know. Not in spite of it… honestly, you being a good dad is what really convinced me you’d changed and grown up as a person, that I could take the risk of leaving my marriage for you.”

“Okay,” he murmurs.

“Okay?”

Zayn nods again.

Harry hesitates, then offers, “We can tell them, if you like… what we were going through. It might help.”

“No,” Zayn says. “No, they’re not old enough. I don’t want them to have to think about things like that. I don’t think it’s for a child to know that sort of thing. If they want to act up over me being gone, fine, I’ll handle it.”

“Okay.”

“Anything else?”

“What, like… other terms?” Harry gazes at him. “I don’t think I have any more. Just promise to always love me. Even when I’m old and bald and droopy.”

Zayn smiles. “I will. You promise too.”

“You’ll never go bald.”

“I’ll go gray. I’m already going.”

“I know, but it’s sexy.”

“Makes me look like my dad,” Zayn mutters.

Harry pets him, feeling guilty. Zayn only had a few streaks of gray before this year. The stress of it all has left him completely salt-and-pepper. “No, you’re prettier than your dad.”

The smile grows. “Think I’m pretty, huh?”

“You’re very pretty. Oh, by the way, I’ve got Luchford coming tomorrow, for photos.”

Zayn rolls his eyes. “Alright.”

“What, you don’t want any? Photos are the most important part, we’re gonna look at those for the next fifty years.”

“Nah, photos are fine.” He’s quiet for a moment. “Can I make some, ah… can I have some demands of my own?”

“Of course,” Harry says.

“I mean I only have the one,” Zayn says. “Um.” His voice grows husky and soft when he says, “Don’t ever leave me again?”

“I won’t,” Harry promises.

Zayn nods, and Harry pulls him close, wrapping his arms around him and kissing him on the cheek. They lie there in the warm comfort of each other.

“I always thought I wasn’t the marrying type,” Harry whispers in his ear, running his fingers through Zayn’s hair. “I only married Angelos ‘cos it was so hard to pass up, honestly… marry a prince? It was like a dream, like a movie… but I never thought I’d do it ‘cos I really wanted to. Out of love, like this, and nothing else.”

“In a back garden,” Zayn says, mouthing at Harry’s neck in a way that makes his cock tingle. “Y’know, me and Louis got married in the garden.”

“Thought you got married at the courthouse.”

“We ‘ad another ceremony in England, for our families.”

“Oh,” Harry says. “Right, I forgot.”

“It was funny,” Zayn says lightly, as if to dismiss any thoughts of similarities. “We didn’t take it too seriously. I’ll, ah, I’ll take this one more seriously, I promise.”

Harry smiles at the dark ceiling. “Okay. Good.”

Zayn nestles his face into Harry’s neck. “Sort of funny though, me eloping again.”

“We aren’t! We’re inviting people…”

“Yeah, what, two dozen? Niall can’t even come.”

“It’s his own fault he’s in Australia all week. And since when are you overly concerned with Niall?”

“I’m not,” Zayn says, laughing. “Just feels odd when it’s the four of us without him. Usually it’s the four of you without me.”

“Well, that’s what happens when you don’t marry in. Maybe we can make Winnie a member of the band.”

Zayn laughs some more. “There you go. She can do the fiddle when you do that one song with the fiddle in.”

“Oh, don’t pretend you don’t know it’s _Act My Age_.”

“I honestly didn’t.”

“Yeah, right.”

Zayn presses a delicate kiss to his temple, and pets his hair. “I’m sleepy,” he murmurs.

“It’s only like nine, love.”

“I know, ‘m sleepy anyway.”

“You awake enough for a little pie?” Harry says, jostling him very gently. “I stopped by the bakery on my way back to get our catering sorted, and I got a pie for Gemma and Andrew.”

“Pie,” Zayn repeats contemplatively, then goes silent for a while. Harry listens to the comforting hum and patter of the laundry and the rain. “Pie… wot kind?”

“Mixed berry.”

“Hmm. Tiny slice.”

“And tea?” Harry says.

“Of course tea.”

WOLSTANTON, AUGUST 15, 2027

The morning of the wedding dawns gray but clear. Zayn wakes to the sound of lorries beeping as they back up, then aggressive shouting; he pushes open the window and sees Harry in the front yard, trying to defuse an argument between two guys who seem to both be attempting to pull through the circular drive and park directly in front of Gemma’s house.

“I ‘aven’t got all fuckin’ day here!” flowers lorry guy shouts.

“I’ve got food back here!” the other guy (caterer?) shouts back. “Mite more perishable than flowers!”

“This is my fault,” Harry says apologetically, putting his hands up. “I thought I said flowers at eight thirty, food at nine. I think if we can just have one of you pull back up toward the gate a bit —”

“Yeah, tell him to wait back up at the gate, with his fucking flowers!” the caterer bellows.

Zayn drops the curtain and heads into the bathroom, splashing water in his face. Leave Harry to sort that out. He’s good at that sort of thing.

He wanders into the kitchen for coffee and finds Gemma and Andrew there, having a full breakfast in the kitchen and reading the news on tablets. The BBC is on the television, with a presenter calmly explaining bad news from all over the globe.

“Morning,” Gemma says to him. “You want anything to eat?”

Zayn shakes his head. “Just coffee.”

Andrew points to the Keurig. “Keurig.” He points to the fridge. “Or cold brew.”

Zayn chooses the cold brew. Their fridge is gorgeous — all their appliances are. Harry made sure of that.

“Your guest list keeps expanding,” Gemma calls over to him. “Something like forty people now.”

Zayn does some quick mental math. His family plus Harry’s family accounts for about twenty alone, so the rest must be mostly Harry’s friends. He only invited two of his own. He’s sick of everybody, lately — they only want to talk about dumb shit that his grief brain can’t even pretend to be interested in.

Maybe Louis counts as a friend of his? He laughs to himself at the thought.

“What’s funny?” Gemma says, almost suspiciously. She never quite warmed back up to him, as she knows about him cheating on Louis, courtesy of Harry gossiping to her about it back in 2020. Zayn was pissed about that, but Harry’s excuse is that he thought at the time that he’d never interact with Zayn again, much less get back together with him.

She’s been warmer to Zayn after the miscarriages, but those also had the effect of making her triply concerned about Harry. So now she seems torn between protecting her little brother from Cheaty McDrunk and being kind to the grief-stricken man in her kitchen who she can’t quite fully trust. Zayn can’t really blame her. He’s used to people not trusting him, anyway.

“Nothing,” Zayn says to her, sipping his coffee. “So what are the plans for this morning?”

Gemma smiles in that impish way that reminds him of Harry. “We have hair and makeup and wardrobe on the way, as my brother’s decided to hire this, y’know, _Vogue_ photographer for a little garden wedding.”

“That’s Harry for you.”

“What’s Harry for you?” Harry says, appearing in the doorway and hanging onto the jambs with each hand so he can lean in boyishly.

“Hiring Glen for today,” Gemma says.

“Oh, Glen’s just a mate,” Harry says dismissively. “We play darts together, it’s no big deal.”

“You sort out your lorrymen?” Zayn says.

“Yes, all fixed,” Harry says. “Decided to have flower man bring in the flowers ‘round the back, as that makes more sense anyway. By the way, Louis and Liam are almost here.”

“No Niall, then?” Gemma says, glancing up.

“He’s got obligations in Australia,” Harry says regretfully. “He’s going to FaceTime in. Listen, Zayn, are you sure you don’t want to call anyone up last minute? I know you’ve got more than two friends in London right now, and some of them you haven’t seen in ages, I’m sure they’d be happy to make the drive.”

Gemma and Andrew both glance over at him, waiting for his reaction. Zayn shrugs, embarrassed.

“I’m really fine,” he says. “My sisters are coming, parents, cousins, and I’ve got my kids coming and a couple of good mates... what else do I need?”

“One of the mates is an ex,” Harry whispers.

Gemma’s eyebrows shoot up.

“No, he isn’t,” Zayn says, annoyed. “Just one of maybe, like, three loyal people in my life.”

The mate in question is Ewan Mackey, a Man U player Zayn befriended in the aftermath of his divorce and hooked up with a few times when he was particularly lonely and happened to be in England. It never meant anything. Well, maybe it did to Ewan, a bit, but Zayn made it very clear he was only ever just fucking the pain away with a cool bloke he could grab a drink with afterwards. Anyway, they’re still relatively good friends. Ewan even let Zayn bring Mia out to the pitch to kick around with the team, last summer, so presumably no hard feelings there.

Harry grins at him. “Whatever you say. Just don’t invite Taylor.”

“Actually, that would be quite funny,” Gemma says.

“Yeah, that’s what I want most out of my wedding, is a good laugh at my own expense,” Harry says drily.

They hear a shout from the front of the house: “OI OI!”

Harry turns, looking over his shoulder.

“Louis,” Zayn says, leaning on the countertop.

Sure enough, Harry has to step aside a moment later as Louis, Liam and the kids come barreling in. The lads each wrap Harry up in a hug as they pass him (more of a _so sorry about all the miscarriages_ hug than a _happy wedding day_ hug) and the kids run over to Zayn, wrapping their arms around him.

“Hi kiddos,” Zayn says, pulling them both in. He’s really happy that they actually want to hug him; he was afraid they might still be too angry about their summer of abandonment.

“Hi Dad,” Mia chirps, and more quietly from Amir: “Hi Daddy.”

He squeezes them, giving them each a kiss on the head.

“Harry,” Louis says, clapping him on the shoulder. “We’ve blocked one of your lorrymen in with the Rover. Presumably that’s going to be a problem, but we didn’t really have a choice. You’ve got paps lurking across the way, we didn’t want to street park and give them a perfect shot of us coming in.”

“Oh God,” Harry says, and bolts back down the hallway toward the front door.

“Wait, take the keys!” Liam calls out, and then tosses them to him underhand.

“Really sort of poorly laid out, that driveway,” Andrew says. “Not to bitch about our house your brother bought us, or anything.”

Gemma laughs. “No, it’s an awful driveway.”

Louis and Liam come over to say hello and fetch themselves some coffee. Zayn stays still, his kids clinging to him, as Liam starts the Keurig and Louis gives Gemma a hug and friendly kiss on the cheek.

“Andrew,” Liam says cheerily. “How’s business?”

“Abso fabso,” Andrew says.

Zayn keeps his ears pricked for more information — he keeps forgetting what exactly it is Andrew does, and it’s much too late to ask now that they’re about to be brothers-in-law — but they’re interrupted by Harry coming back.

“False alarm,” Harry says. “He was able to get turned around.”

“Oh, cheers, good,” Louis says.

Harry nods, then squeezes his eyes shut and hangs onto the door jamb again, his jaw tight. He looks peaked.

“You alright?” Zayn says. The kids glance up and over at him.

Harry nods. “Fine,” he says. “Just a bit lousy today. Nauseous.”

Everyone’s quiet.

“It’s not what you’re thinking,” Harry quickly adds. “I’m not, erm...” He cuts himself off, glancing at the kids. “I’m not. It’s just my hormones aren’t quite back to normal yet.”

“If you want to go lie down, we’ve got a while before anyone else shows up,” Zayn says.

Harry nods. “Yeah. I’ll do that.”

“Feel better,” they all chorus as he trudges back off down the hallway.

“What exactly are hormones?” Mia pipes up.

“I don’t actually know, love,” Louis says. “I think they’re… hmm. A type of gland? No, that’s not right.”

“We’re all very uneducated,” Liam says apologetically to her.

“Why are Harry’s glands not normal?” Amir says. “Is that why he was sick all summer?”

“Part of it,” Zayn murmurs.

“Do _I_ have hormones?” Amir says.

“Not yet, I don’t think,” Zayn says. “Not the same kind, anyway. These are for adults.”

Mia looks at him shrewdly. “Aren’t hormones from being pregnant? Is Harry pregnant?”

Everyone’s looking at Zayn, now. He inhales with difficulty.

“No,” he says softly. “Harry isn’t pregnant.”

There’s a delicate silence, then, that no one seems to want to break.

“Oh, hey,” Liam interrupts, looking down at his phone. “So the thyroid controls hormones, and it is, in fact, a gland.”

Louis cheers. “Now who’s uneducated, Payno?”

*

When he’s finished his coffee, Zayn goes to check on Harry, who’s lying on his side in bed looking at his phone.

Zayn crawls over the bed to him and settles behind him, cuddling up with him and kissing him on the shoulder. “Alright?”

“Yeah,” Harry murmurs. “Just keep pushing myself too hard, lately.”

“I know. You need to quit it.”

“It’s what I always do, though.”

“This’s been hard on you, your doctor said so. Your body’s been on, like, a rollercoaster, you’re only human.”

“I don’t like to be human,” Harry says without irony.

Zayn peers over his shoulder. He’s looking at a video of the baby that her foster mum sent them. Zayn’s not as attached to her as Harry is, yet, but he still smiles at seeing her.

“I just keep thinking, what if they don’t let us have her?” Harry murmurs.

“Why wouldn’t they, love?”

“I dunno. Maybe someone’s going to ring them up to sabotage us… somebody one of us fucked over, once, and they’re gonna tell them awful things about us.”

“I don’t think you’ve got enemies like that,” Zayn says lightly, not really taking him seriously. “Not ones that know we’re tryin’ to adopt, anyway.”

“No, us adopting is out there in the American rags. Someone leaked to _People_. Someone on my team, I’m sure, so I’m going to have to do another purge soon.” Harry goes quiet. “If someone leaked the miscarriages I’d go fucking nuclear. I’d fire everyone.”

“They won’t do that, they’d be terrified to.”

“As they should be,” Harry says icily.

“Look, but nobody knows what agency we’re usin’, right? So how would they know who to call to fuck us over?”

“Oh, yeah,” Harry says, and he sounds a little less burdened as he does. “You’re right.”

“You were actually worried about that?”

“I’m worried about everything, lately,” Harry admits.

“I think we’re alright.” Zayn kisses him again. “What could they possibly say no to, huh? Married couple, as of today. Got, like, insane amounts of money, got a nice house. Really want a baby. I’ve already got kids, and they’re not dead or on heroin, or anything.”

Harry laughs.

“You want to put a pin in this?” Zayn says, nudging him. “At least go say hi to Nick?”

“Nick’s here?”

“Yeah, got here a few minutes ago. Said he drove up as soon he was done with work.”

“Christ, I forgot how early he’s on,” Harry says. “Alright, yeah, I’m up. I took a few compazine, I should be alright.” He sits up, then pauses, squeezing his eyes shut and gripping the bed.

“Harry.”

“I’m fine.” His eyes spring back open. “It’s just dizziness. It’s, y’know… hormones’re all crazy.”

“Alright,” Zayn says, not totally believing him. He sits up too. “I’m gonna, ah… probably go in the back and kick a football around with the kids. Not really my crowd in this house, right now.”

Harry laughs. “People who love me aren’t your crowd?”

“Not when they don’t like me.”

Harry rolls his eyes. “That’s nonsense and you know it, but fine. Don’t kick any footballs into the decorations.”

“We’ll be light as a feather, you’ll never know we were there.”

“To that point, don’t let Louis join you,” Harry says.

“Aye.”

*

Harry recovers beautifully over the course of the morning, putting his usual mask on as their guests start arriving. By the time they’re getting ready in the guest room, he’s like a different person: his shoulder-length hair pulled up and arranged in a wee bun, his tux on, his dark circles BB-creamed away and his expression serene.

“Feeling better?” Zayn asks him once he’s pulled his own jacket on, and his stylist is running a lint brush over the left sleeve.

Harry looks impassively over at him. “Huh?”

“You feel better? You seem better.”

Harry casts his gaze down, his brow knitting. “I’m not sure,” he says. “I sort of just stopped thinking about it.”

“Well, whatever works,” Zayn says.

Harry has a seat at the vanity and starts examining his face, prodding at his cheeks like they don’t belong to him. Zayn knows what he’s unhappy about — he’s been puffy lately, from being pumped full of estrogen and then being pregnant and then miscarrying and having to spend a few days in the hospital for near-sepsis, then more estrogen, pregnant, miscarriage, estrogen, pregnant, miscarriage. Zayn doesn’t want to say anything, as Harry himself hasn’t brought it up, but he wants to tell him that he thinks he’s utterly lovely and striking and perfect the way he is. That his heart is aching just from looking at him, right now, and he still can’t quite believe they’re together or that he could ever get this lucky.

He’ll tell him later, when they’re alone.

The stylist, Cherise, comes over and starts fiddling with Zayn’s vest. “I wish we could have had this taken in a little more,” she says regretfully. “You didn’t come in for a fitting, did you?”

“No, sorry,” Zayn mutters. “Couldn’t find the time last week.”

“Reckon I had his measurements wrong,” Harry says. “My goof.”

The ones Harry has actually aren’t wrong. They’re Zayn’s usual measurements, he’s just been starving himself out of self-loathing lately. In his fucked-up brain, he kept thinking if he abstained from everything good that God would stop killing their babies. But he’s already sober, so there wasn’t much to abstain from besides sex (which he mostly wasn’t allowed to have with Harry anyway), cigarettes, and eating food. He didn’t much feel like eating, besides. When he got fatigued to the point of dizziness, he’d eat a banana, and then go another seven hours.

It’s fine. He’ll eat tonight, at least. There’s catering: salmon, and fingerling potatoes, and broccolini and all that wedding shit.

“I think it looks alright,” Zayn mutters. “Not drowning in it.” Probably better, anyway, for him to hide behind a bit of fabric and not look flagrantly ribby, like some abused racetrack greyhound.

Cherise leaves him, and the other stylist, Jo, comes over to fix his hair.

Zayn patiently stands there while she works on him. There isn’t really much that his hair needs, besides being artfully swooped, which has already been done. She’s just adjusting the parabola of the swoop.

The kids come bursting into the room, then. They’re fully dressed — Mia in a lavender dress that Harry had found for her, and Amir in a little suit with a lavender tie on.

“Hi,” Mia says. “We’re bored. Are you done?”

Zayn checks his watch. “It’s eleven thirty,” he said. “We get married at two. Amuse yourselves a while.”

“We’ve been amusing ourselves all morning,” Amir complains.

“Quit whining,” Zayn says firmly. “Go visit with your aunties. They haven’t seen you in ages.”

“We already diiiiid,” Mia says.

“Go play with your cousins.”

“They’re babies!”

“I hear whining, Yasmeen.”

“It’s not fair, though, being older than all our cousins,” Mia says. “When they’re our age we’re gonna be, like, eighteen. And they’re gonna have fun together at family weddings, and we’ll just be old and boring, but we won’t be old enough to have fun with the adults yet.”

“You two can have fun with each other,” Zayn says. “That’s the point of having kids a year apart. You’re meant to keep each other company.”

“That means we’re stuck with each other forever,” Mia says to Amir, who shrugs.

“Dad,” he interrupts, and he comes over to the bed and flops onto the edge of it in a very Louis-like pratfall. “Am I your best man? Harry said I could be your best man.”

“If you like,” Zayn says, then immediately chides himself. Don’t play hard to get with your son, you lunatic. “Yeah, ‘course. You want to stand up with me during the ceremony? Hold some flowers? We’ve got more flowers than we know what to do with.”

Amir nods eagerly. He likes flowers.

“Wait,” Mia says, looking left out. “Can I be Harry’s best man?”

“Maid of honor, love,” Zayn says.

“No, best man! Girls have maids of honor, boys have best men.”

“She’s got you there,” Jo says, smiling. “Okay, I think you’re done, Zayn? If you want to take a look in the mirror…”

Zayn goes over and nudges Harry aside, giving him a quick peck on the cheek. He turns his head from side to side, examining his hair.

“Looks perfect to me,” Harry says. “You’re relieved from duty, Jo, go ahead and get yourself a mimosa.”

“Roger,” Jo says, saluting them and heading out.

Harry swivels in his stool, and Zayn turns to follow his gaze. “Mia,” he says, “wouldn’t you like to be our flower girl? We don’t have one.”

Mia gives him a look. “Harry, how old am I now?”

“You’re eleven, sweetheart.”

“And a half.”

“And a half. My apologies.”

“My flower girl days are behind me,” she says dramatically, like an aging Broadway diva.

Harry laughs. “Best man it is.”

“Do I get to make a toast?” Mia says.

“If you like,” Harry says. “Don’t say anything too mean about me.”

She grins. “I won’t.”

“You want to make a toast?” Zayn says to Amir, smiling, already knowing what the answer is.

Amir shakes his head frantically. “No, no no. Thank you but no.”

He laughs. “Cheers for being polite about it.”

Mia twirls, making her skirt flare out around her, then keeps twirling over to the bed, where she flops down next to Amir. “Harry, are you gonna give us a stepdad talk?”

Zayn sits down on the bed beside his kids, fiddling with his cufflinks. Harry’s silent for a long moment, which makes Zayn glance up and meet his eyes in the mirror.

“Um, what?” Harry says, seemingly jerked from a reverie.

“Stepdad talk,” Mia says. “Like Liam gave us before he married Dad.”

Zayn’s heart quickens unpleasantly, and his stomach turns. “What stepdad talk did Liam give you?”

Mia shrugs. “He said, like, he’d be there for us and he’d always be there for Dad, and he was gonna make sure us and Sunday never had to go through another divorce.”

Zayn’s face is hot; he feels sick. He doesn’t know why this is getting to him so much — it’s a reasonable thing to say to your stepkids, especially if, like Liam, you’re a blithering optimist who’s so in love with Louis you wouldn’t care if he ran you down with his car. And wrapped up in it is an admission from Liam that he, too, broke a home.

But it hurts anyway. Some burning, stinging thing inside of Zayn is now taunting him: _What if you fuck your marriage up again? What if you start drinking again, what if you’re too much for him, what if you cheat, what if you go crazy? What if Harry leaves you again?_

A lifetime together. A lifetime? He didn’t understand that was what he was implying, either of the previous times he proposed. Perrie, he was trying to buy off. Louis, he was trying to exert some control where he felt he had none, trying to make sure their kids grew up in semi-normalcy.

He doesn’t know if he ever expected he was going to be married to Louis forever. Probably not, deep down. He just had a frantic need for Louis to love him that never really abated until Louis ended things for good — that, more than a sense of commitment or duty, was what drove him in their marriage. His self-esteem was yoked to Louis’ attitude toward him for that five years. On days where they were fighting, Zayn was angry, cynical, restless. On days things were good, he felt happy and confident. It was, in truth, a relief to be released from that. Getting divorced was like coming out the end of a riptide.

With Harry, it’s different. Commitment is the name of the game, with them; Harry is the only person who ever wanted to wait for him, who ever believed in waiting. And Zayn waited for Harry, too, despite all evidence that he was lost to him for good.

It could still go wrong. He could break Harry’s heart again, and Harry’s so fragile right now. It’s possible they might not get past their infertility; if Harry never gets and stays pregnant — and it looks like he might never want to even try again — that would make him retreat further inside himself. If they can’t adopt this baby girl, that’ll devastate him even more.

Forever is so long. It’s the rest of their lives, however long that is. It’s all the days, all the bad ones, all the terrible ones. Every time they’re sick of each other, every time Zayn says something nasty that he doesn’t mean and Harry looks like he’s been struck in the face. Every time someone they love dies and they have to suffer through that whole ordeal, cry together, sit next to each other in a pew in their black suits. Every time some big-shot Hollywood guy walks over to their table at a restaurant and talks to Harry like Zayn isn’t even there. Every time they disagree about how to parent, every time Harry feels threatened by Louis’ constant presence as a co-parent, every time Zayn wants to drink. If one of them gets sick, if something truly catastrophic happens. Forever.

And that’s it. That’s all his life will ever be. He’s not just promising to love Harry forever — he’s signing away the broad, open expanse of his future. Zayn is either saying knows exactly what the rest of his life will entail, from today until the cold grave, or he’s saying that at some point he’s going to get another divorce. Fail again. Break his kids’ hearts, again, break another home, be ripped from comfortable familiarity once more.

He’s having the existential crisis Harry probably was last night, when he got all weepy and started talking about how they can fuck other people if they want, someday. Wow, Harry is worried enough about Zayn cheating that he’s already accepted non-monogamy as an eventual condition of their relationship. That didn’t fully sink in until just now.

Zayn suddenly wants to drink. He wants to get blind drunk and go pummel Liam. _Why are you so sure of yourself?_ he wants to scream at him. _Why are you so sure you can love Louis forever? I couldn’t!_

But maybe Liam’s not, even. Maybe that’s just something he said to reassure the kids, which is even worse to think about. Louis being with Liam pisses him off, but Louis being without Liam? Bitter, single, traumatizing the kids with his bitter singleness? Probably he’d just drag some random person into their lives as soon as humanly possible so he wouldn’t have to be alone for more than ten seconds. At least Liam is a known quantity.

God, everything is so fragile.

This all crosses Zayn’s mind in a few lurching, queasy moments, and then he looks up to see that Harry has come over to the kids and knelt by the bed, resting his chin on his arms on the edge. They roll over onto their stomachs and peer curiously at him.

Harry stretches out his hand across the bedspread, and they put both of their small ones in his big palm.

“I will always be here for you guys,” he says, his voice low. “I will always be here for your dad. Promise.”

Zayn tightens his jaw, feeling emotional. Harry always knows the right thing to say, he has all the best lines up his sleeve.

He kind of wishes he was a kid again, and that it was always someone else’s job to cheer and reassure him, never his own — and better yet, that he could believe them when they did. He needs some comfort, lately. It’s been such a long year.

“Harry? Are you sick?” Amir says in a quiet voice.

“No,” Harry reassures him. “I’m healthy as a horse.”

*

Zayn lurks in the house even after everyone has gone out to the back garden to mingle and be served the specialty cocktail of the evening (Tom Collinses with lavender syrup and lavender sprigs sticking out of them). He can hear the soft roar of conversation from the kitchen as he stands there, looking out the window, waiting for the Xanax he took to kick in.

Harry is chatting with a few of his friends, smiling. Zayn knows it’s mostly an act, but it’s eerie to see him so lighthearted after months of nothing but pain and drudgery. When he’s seen Harry’s genuine smile, this summer, there’s been something unhinged about it — a feral flash of teeth, a staccato burst of laughter that’s nothing like his real laugh, like he’s forgotten how.

It’s not raining anymore, but the garden is a lush green, impregnated with rainwater. Women are getting their stiletto heels stuck in the soft grass; men, their lifts.

The music, which was some inoffense light classical, switches to an actual song. Fleetwood Mac. _I Don’t Wanna Know._ Jesus Christ. Isn’t this whole album about cheating and breakups? Who’s picking the music? They didn’t hire a DJ, so it must be Gemma or somebody.

He notices that Glen is walking around with a large camera in his hands, taking candid shots of people, stalking through the crowd like a panther.

The jangly, upbeat music bleeds tinnily into the house, the sound of it warped by layers of wood and glass. Zayn keeps staring at Harry, gripping the counter as his heart seems to swell and creep nauseatingly up into his throat. Suddenly his vest feels tight, despite it being loose on him. He starts to unbutton it frantically, but it’s those fucking fabric buttons and tiny holes, and his hands are sweaty and fumbly.

Someone opens the breakfast nook door from the back garden. It’s Louis. He’s holding a purple drink.

“Oi, people are looking for you,” he says. “They sorta wanna get this show on the road.”

Zayn can’t talk. He’ll freak out if he talks. He gives him a thumbs up.

Louis comes over to him. “You alright?” he says, putting a hand on his shoulder. “You’re pale, mate. You’re me-colored.”

Zayn breathes out a laugh. “‘M fine,” he manages.

Louis tries to hand him the drink. Zayn looks him at like he’s crazy.

Louis laughs. “No, it’s just lemonade,” he says. “They’ve got drinks for the kids and the sobers, too.”

“Why’s it purple? Looks like lean.”

“Ha, I said the same thing to Payno.”

Zayn takes the glass and drains half of it. It’s really good, actually. Then his stomach lurches like he might vomit, and he bends over the sink, dry heaving.

Louis wraps an arm around him and starts rubbing his back. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Zayn chokes out.

“Not nothin’. Something. What is it?”

He’s not breathing right, he can tell, but as hard as he tries to, he only sucks in air more choppily. Then it hits him: reality slipping away, starting to feel fake and plasticine, like he’s on the set of a television show. He’s terrified, like trouble is imminent, and then that feeling narrows in on him. Not trouble... Death. He’s going to die, right now.

No, no, Zayn tells himself, you know what this is, and it isn’t real, it never is.

But he feels cornered like an animal, and there is no escape. It’s like God is about to open up the sky and pluck him, screaming, from the Earth.

He tries to focus on Louis’ reassuring touch on his back, and the fact that there are people outside. People, people. And they’re right down the road from a hospital. If he keels over, help would come.

There’s a rushing sound. Running water next to his face. Something cold slaps him, making him jerk. Louis’ wet hand?

“Come on,” Louis says, slapping him again on the other cheek, then pushing his head under the faucet entirely.

“Fuck off!” Zayn shouts, ducking away, shaking off like a dog. “My hair, they spent like a half hour on that!”

“You look like you’re about to pass out, so shut up about your hair, you vain priss. C’mon.”

Louis drags him to his feet, then grabs a banana off the counter and pulls him along, down the hallway and past the stairs, into the guest bathroom.

Once inside, Zayn sits down on the closed toilet lid (really more like collapses) while Louis hovers, examining him.

“Eat this,” he says, handing him a banana. “The entire thing. And I don’t want to hear any bitching.”

Zayn reluctantly takes the banana and slowly unpeels it, forcing a small bite into his mouth and chewing without tasting.

“I am sorry about your hair,” Louis adds. “Can your bird come in and fix it real quick?”

“I dunno,” Zayn says numbly. “What time is it?”

“Twelve fifteen.”

That means nothing to him. Harry planned everything.

“Eat more banana,” Louis orders, in the voice he uses on the kids when they’re being defiant.

Zayn reluctantly obeys.

Louis goes over and perches on the edge of the tub in his suit, hands clasped between his knees. “Panic attack?”

Zayn nods.

Louis tilts his head at him. “You anxious about today?”

“Yeah,” he admits.

“What for? It’s Harry. You’re mad about Harry.”

“I dunno,” Zayn mutters, pressing three knuckles into the center of his chest in an attempt to calm himself. “It’s not, like, cold feet. I’m just thinking about a lot of shit.”

“Like what?”

“I dunno,” he repeats.

“I can’t help you if you won’t tell me what’s wrong, mate.”

Zayn eats more banana and feels himself slowly calming down. “Something my dad said a while back,” he says. “That I should’ve made it work with you, that I couldn’t keep jumping from person to person and expect I’m gonna be happy… same problems are gonna follow me…”

He thought he’d feel better saying this aloud, but no. He drops his head down between his legs, elbows on his knees, and tries to keep breathing normally.

“I mean, parts of that are valuable advice to anyone, I think, but it doesn’t really apply to your current situation,” Louis says. “You’ve changed a lot since we were together, and we each always wanted different things to begin with. Your dad probably said that ‘cos we’ve got kids together, is all. He’s from a different time.”

“Different time?” Zayn wheezes. “What, the seventies?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’m just fuckin’ scared,” Zayn says to the floor. “It’s forever. Y’know? I never thought about this that way before. When we got married, did you think it was for forever? Did you think we’d actually get old together?”

Louis is very quiet, for so long that Zayn finally lifts his head to look at him. When he does, Louis looks sad.

“No,” he says softly. “I don’t reckon I did.”

“Yeah?” Zayn says, his heart aching. “D’you — d’you ever wish I hadn’t asked in the first place?”

Louis gives him a wistful smile. “No, love,” he says. “I very much wanted you to ask, I would’ve been hurt if you didn’t. And I think it’s good that we were married for a while. I didn’t used to think that mattered, but it does.”

“Y’know, you didn’t have to say yes.”

“No, I didn’t.” Louis shrugs, hugging his arms to himself. “But I don’t regret it, y’know. I did love you. I loved being partners in crime with you. I just don’t think the two of us ever could’ve… I dunno. We’re good in the moment, you and me. We’ve got great chemistry. But the long slog of it, the whole life stuff… that’s a different sort of chemistry. We just don’t have it.”

Zayn sighs. “Yeah. I sort of… I dunno. You believe in the one, at all?”

“The one like soulmates? Ah, I dunno. Liam does.”

“You don’t think he’s the one?”

“I mean, he’s the one I picked, yeah.”

“What d’you think of him as?”

Louis smiles. “My best friend.”

This isn’t a good enough answer for Zayn, who rasps, “Why’d you marry him?”

“Oh, I wanted to beat you to gettin’ remarried,” he says airily, and Zayn laughs. “Nah, nah. I just wanted to. And it was good to do for the kids, good for stability.”

“That’s enthusiastic.”

“I dunno. I’m not very romantic about marriage. I mean, you know as well as anyone.”

“I do,” Zayn says. “‘Ad to beg you to marry me.”

“Oh, love… it wasn’t ‘cos I didn’t love you,” Louis says, his face softening. “What twenty-four year old bloke wants to get married, really?”

“I did. Your husband did.”

“Reckon I’m just built different,” Louis said. “I did want it, on some level, ‘cos I wanted to be a family with you. I was just scared.”

And the shit he was scared of was exactly what came to pass, because of Zayn. Great. Zayn sighs, looking down at his hands.

“Well, I’m glad you did get married again,” he mutters. “I like the kids havin’ that security... Liam takes good care of all of you. Honestly, seeing how happy you are and how they benefit from it, ‘s’part of why I feel alright about getting remarried.”

Louis smiles. “Thank you, love. I’m happy for you, too.”

“I think Harry’s the one,” Zayn says. “Feels like we were together in a past life, or somethin’, I dunno.” He pauses. “Sorry. Christ. Is that a sort of trash comment to make to your ex-husband?”

“I can excuse it,” Louis says, the smile growing wry.

Zayn laughs. “I did, um, want it to be you, though,” he says. “For a long time, I felt like with all the shit we went through, it had to be destiny. I wanted us to make it.”

“I did too.”

“I think I knew deep down what you said, though,” Zayn says. “That it couldn’t last.”

“So that is why you’re so antsy?” Louis says. “‘Cos for the first time, you’re lookin’ down the barrel at forever?”

“I think so.”

Louis nods. “Well, it is scary.”

“You weren’t scared when you married Liam,” Zayn accuses. “Don’t lie and say you were, ‘cos I could tell you weren’t.”

“Look, it’s a tough time for you, right now, and in general your life’s been sort of fucked up by instability, this past decade,” Louis says. “Plus, I dunno, we just think about things and react to ‘em differently. Like I said, I didn’t come at it so romantically. I knew I wanted to spend the rest of me life with Liam, but as far as the actual marriage bit, you know — it’s a lovely gesture, but at the end of the day it’s a legal transaction, is what it is. So, y’know.”

Zayn picks up the banana and has another bite — it actually is making him feel better to eat, much to his annoyance.

“You’re soundin’ like Harry,” he says. “He put a clause in on our marriage.”

“Wait, a _clause_?” Louis says, his face lighting up with amusement. “What, d’you owe him a fifth album? Does he get your masters if you divorce him?”

Zayn laughs limply. “No, he was like — well, since we’ve both cheated in the past, if one of us cheats, we should try to work it out.” His voice falters. “And went out of his way to say, like… ‘if you cheat, I’ll forgive you.’”

Louis nods, looking pensive. “I don’t think that means he _expects_ you to,” he says, in a gentle way.

“But what a shitty thing to hear, honestly,” Zayn says. “And the worst thing is I deserve it. And it’s shit, I hate it. I hate that he had to say that to me. I just hate…” He shakes his head. “I feel like no matter how much I change or what I do, my life’s always gonna be defined by three or four things, and I can’t fuckin’ stand that. And that’s it, yeah? Three or four things, my whole life, and then I’m dead.”

“You should be a motivational speaker, mate,” Louis says. “Look, after what you’ve been through this year, I don’t think Harry doubts you’re devoted. When you told me you two’d been trying to get pregnant, I’ll admit was a bit surprised — and thank you for waiting ‘til after my wedding to drop that one on me —”

Zayn laughs.

“— but, y’know, I understood it was something you were doing for him, ‘cos it was a dream of his and you wanted to keep him and help him make it come true. And I really respected that, ‘cos it showed a certain maturity, to make that sacrifice so early on. And then to take care of him the way you have been. I think Harry’s estimation of you is different than your own.”

“We were just so angry at each other for so long,” Zayn mutters. “It’s hard not to feel like on some level, he still thinks shitty things about me.”

“You were both hurt,” Louis says. “And not talking about it. That breeds a lot of nonsense thoughts and defensive macho shit, but it’s not real. Love is what’s real.”

Someone knocks on the door, then.

“Busy,” Louis shouts at them.

“It’s Liam,” Liam calls.

Zayn sighs.

“I’m talking to Zayn, sweetheart,” Louis calls back. “He’s a bit stressed. Everything alright?”

“Yeah, just people are looking for him,” Liam says. “Hi Zayn.”

“Hi,” Zayn says. “Is people Harry?”

“People includes Harry. What should I tell him?”

Zayn and Louis look nervously at each other.

“Tell him I didn’t eat all day and I got sort of woozy and needed to go sit down,” Zayn says. “Also, can you find Jo and let her know I need a quick fix-up?”

“Okay,” Liam says, then after an awkward pause: “So we are still having a wedding today, then?”

“No,” Louis calls, sounding amused. “I’ve talked him out of it and we’re runnin’ away together, sorry to tell you like this.”

“Aww,” Liam says, laughing. “That’s a bit of a bummer.”

“Well, that’s how it shakes out sometimes,” Louis says.

“Alright, I’ll go tell Harry what’s up,” Liam says. “Don’t take too long, though.”

They wait until they’re sure he’s gone, and then Zayn says, with difficulty, “D’you forgive me?”

Louis’ blue eyes flicker. “For what?”

Zayn’s breath seems to leave his lungs all at once. He drags a tiny bit of it back before managing to say, “For cheating. For breaking us up.”

Louis’ face gets pinched and small the way it does when he’s upset and doesn’t want to show it. He looks down.

“Even if you don’t, please say you do?” he adds, and they both laugh. “I just — I’m sorry. Sorry. Forget it.”

“No, uh,” Louis says, then breathes out a heavy exhale. “Um. Wow. Wasn’t expecting to have this conversation with you today.”

“Louis, I’m dead serious, don’t worry about it. I shouldn’t’ve brought it up.”

Louis meets his eyes again. “Didn’t I tell you I forgave you?” he says. “When I left you, I told you that.”

“I don’t remember,” Zayn admits. “I don’t remember much from ‘round then. Did you mean it?”

“I think so.”

“Even lookin’ back on it years later? All the fallout from it? The hurt I caused, the hurt the divorce caused the kids?”

“I wouldn’t have the nice life I’ve got now, if we hadn’t split up,” Louis says. “So how can I regret it?”

Zayn shrugs helplessly.

“Tell me this, though, was there ever anything else? You fucked the one bloke, and you kissed a girl at a party, you told me that. But was there anything else?”

“Why?”

“I‘m just curious. I always felt like maybe there was. Nothing serious, mind, just little slips.”

“There wasn’t anything else.” Zayn pauses, feeling sort of insane, because he just lied, and he doesn’t even know why. “Nah, I mean... alright, little slips, yeah. I kissed a few other people. And danced with people, at clubs, sometimes. When I was on tour, there was shit like that… dancing, flirting, like. Maybe not cheating, but disrespectful shit, I disrespected you. That tour was, y’know... I was drunk quite literally all the time. I barely remember a lot of the nights out I had. But I know I never let it cross that line, not ‘til the poker game.”

Louis nods. “Were you disrespecting me while I was pregnant?”

Aching, Zayn admits, “A bit, while you were pregnant with Mia. Just in the beginning, right when you’d first come home, when I had to work on my album, and I was doing all that partying. I got my act together after you had her, ‘cos I realized I loved you both so much. Plus, after the thing with Liam… I realized I could really lose you to him, if I wasn’t careful, if rumors got back to you… I was afraid you’d run off wiv him for good.”

Louis looks crestfallen for half a second, and then he tightens up again.

“I just felt so apart from you,” Zayn quickly says. “We hadn’t really decided what our relationship was. I felt like you didn’t even want to be with me for any reason beside the baby... I dunno. I didn’t think of it as cheating, at the time. I really had convinced myself I wasn’t doing anythin’ wrong.”

A muscle in Louis’ tight jaw twitches, and he nods. “I think I always sort of knew that was what was going on,” he says. “Reckon that’s why I’d get so angry with you when you’d come home late.”

“Lou, I’m so sorry. I’m really fuckin’ sorry. I cut it out for a long time, once we had the kids. I didn’t do that shit again ‘til I went back on tour, and when I came back I stopped again.”

“Okay. Anything while I was pregnant with Amir?”

“No, no, mate! I thought we were doin’ really well, around then.”

“I thought so too,” Louis says wryly. “Just making sure.”

“Look, I loved you so much, I did. I dunno why I did the shit I used to do.” He’s in pain, but there’s a kind of catharsis, too. Zayn didn’t realize how corrosive it was for him to keep this hidden guiltily away for so long.

Louis nods again, tears gathering in his eyes. “It’s okay, mate.”

“No, it’s not okay. It’s not.”

“Zayn.”

“Yeah?”

“I forgive you,” he says simply. “For all of it.”

Zayn clears his throat. “Do you?”

“Yeah,” Louis says, and gives him a tiny, fragile smile, blinking hard. “I do. Ancient history, yeah?”

“You look hurt, love. You’re cryin’.”

“It’s just my pride. It’s hard to think about all this again.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright. I’m sorry myself… sorry for the shit with Liam. I’m sorry I was carryin’ on an emotional affair with him when I’d just gotten back with you, when we were expecting a baby. That wasn’t fair to you either. And I let it go on far too long.”

Zayn lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding, feeling like he’s being purged of some toxin. “Thanks for admitting that’s what it was.”

Louis nods. “I know you just wanted me to love you, like, wanted me to be yours and only yours,” he says. “I know the Liam thing must’ve been proper painful.” He looks down at his hands, rubbing his thumb over his knuckle. “I do get that. I didn’t want to hurt you. I did end up fallin’ in love with you, and only you, so. You got what you wanted in the end, I hope you know.”

“Then I threw it away,” Zayn says, self-abusively.

Louis lets out a little sigh. “It was never quite right, our marriage. There’s so much that’s good with us, but there’s so much that doesn’t work. I think things turned out the way they’re supposed to be.”

“We were so young, so fuckin’ stupid.”

“Yeah. Not a big surprise we always had trust issues, considering what sort of start we got off to in general. Perrie, and everything…”

“Yeah,” Zayn says, exhaling a choked laugh, releasing more painful tension from his body. He really wants a cigarette — though, mercifully, the Xanax does seem to be kicking in. “I know.”

“We all make mistakes, y’know? We all do bad things.”

Zayn steels himself against the difficulty of accepting that this is true. “Yeah.”

“One other thing I never told you,” Louis says. “When I was pregnant with Mims, I had this massive crush on one of the builders who worked on her nursery. When you were at the studio, I used to sit around and watch him work, then go jerk off.”

Zayn laughs. “Which one?”

“Don’t even remember his name now. He was fit, though… pretty built, too. Big muscles.”

“Oh, fantastic,” Zayn says, a tiny bit annoyed. “Why’d you ever even fuck me, honestly? Clearly your type wiv blokes is, like, himbo muscleheads, innit?”

“Are you calling poor Payno a himbo?” Louis says, laughing. “No, no, ‘course I was attracted to you. You’re strong too, just wiry.”

“Uh-huh. Sure.”

“Why’d you ever fuck _me_?” Louis adds. “That’s the question I’ve always had, ‘cos I’m not your type at all. Nothin’ flashy about me. I’m not beautiful and forty feet tall.”

“Guess some things are better left unexamined, yeah?”

They grin at each other.

“Look,” Louis says, “Harry didn’t say what he said ‘cos he wants you to feel all horrible and shamey about yourself. He said that ‘cos he wants you to know that he loves you so much, he loves you as much as the worst things you’ve ever done. The things you’ve done that you’re the most sick about.”

Zayn nods. Louis sounds a lot like the therapists he had in rehab. He probably would make a good therapist, actually.

“He’s not perfect, either… he’s fucked around before, he did cheat on his husband with you,” Louis points out.

“Yeah, and he mentioned that,” Zayn mutters. “It was part of the whole thing...”

“Well, there you are, then,” Louis says. “So he wants you to love him for all his ugly bits, too. That’s what marriage is, so that’s why he said that. You know, you alienate _yourself_ , Zayn. You do get this very warped, ugly mentality about things, and I wish you didn’t. I wish you could see what I see today… loads of people that love you, love Harry, and feel just sick about the terrible time you’ve both been having. We all want so much for you to just have a lovely day, a nice wedding.”

This is too much. Zayn starts crying, tears streaming silently down his face.

“Oh, don’t do that,” Louis says, coming over to hug him. “Sorry. You’re going to look awful for your photos, all damp and puffy… Harry’s gonna kill me…”

Zayn chokes out a laugh through his tears. “I love you,” he says to him, sincerely.

Louis pats his back, burying his face against his shoulder. “I love you too,” he says in his sweet voice. “It’s okay, mate. I promise it is. I swear everything’s gonna be alright.”

Zayn squeezes him harder. “I know. I know.”

“Look, you want a tip? Just focus on Harry. Think about how in love with him you are, and how much you want to see him happy, and just take it day by day. Each day wake up and try to be the best husband you can be, same way you try to be the best dad you can be.”

“Yeah,” he murmurs. “Okay.”

“You don’t look at our kids and think, _oh God, it’s forever!_ , do you?” Louis jokes.

Zayn laughs again. “No.”

“Well, there you are! The kids are forever too, but we’re glad for that, aren’t we? I know getting married’s a bit different, but not too much so. It’s just a commitment you choose to work at and honor, that’s all. It’s not a prison sentence.”

“Yeah. No, you’re right.”

Louis straightens up. “I’m always right,” he says, smiling, his eyes twinkling. “Can we get this show on the road already? Took me twenty minutes to wrestle the fuckin’ kids into their wedding outfits while you and Harry were putting your makeup on or whatever. I don’t want that to all be for nothin’.”

Zayn laughs. “Y’know, you’re probably a better ex-husband than I deserve you to be,” he admits.

“Yeah, you’re right, and thank you,” Louis says. “Now let’s go get your hair fixed.”

*

Jo is visibly upset with Zayn, but manages to restrain this as he takes a seat at the vanity in the guest room. “At least your hair’s fun to play with,” she sighs.

“I’m goin’ gray,” Zayn says mournfully.

“I know! It’s lovely on you. Very distinguished.”

“Ugh.”

The door opens, and Harry pops his head in. Zayn is massively relieved to see him.

“Are you okay?” Harry says to him in his low voice. “Liam made it sound like you were passed out in ketosis somewhere.”

Zayn laughs. “I just got low blood sugar, is all. I had a banana.”

Harry looks worriedly at him. “I didn’t misremember your measurements after all, did I? You’ve lost weight.”

“I’m fine,” Zayn says firmly.

Harry sighs, but doesn’t press the issue.

“When are we supposed to be doing this thing?” Zayn says, raising his voice to be heard over the diffuser Jo is now running his hair through.

“Whenever,” Harry says. “Although, preferably soon, ‘cos Nick has gotten on the mic and keeps joking that you’ve done a runner on me, and I think people are starting to believe him.”

“Fucking… of course he is.”

“Also, people are getting absolutely zooted on those cocktails,” Harry says. “They don’t taste that strong, but they are. Three or four will completely knock you on your arse… my mum fell into a flowerpot.”

“I told you, dry wedding,” Zayn says.

Harry grins. “Good luck hosting a dry wedding in the middle of the English countryside. Nothing else to do out here, they’d start smashing up the furniture or something.”

“They might start smashing up the furniture as it is.”

Jo turns the hair dryer off and squirts product into her hands, then shapes Zayn’s hair like it’s soft serve. 

“How’s the pap situation?” Zayn says.

Harry shrugs. “They got some people coming in. Got Lottie, so all the Twitter speculation’s like, oh my God, is Louis there? Shocking! As if we aren’t publicly friendly with him, and didn’t go to _his_ wedding.”

“Well, people are fuckin’ stupid.”

“That’s your answer to everything,” Harry says, but he says it fondly.

When Jo is done and relatively happy with the second, more rushed hairdo, she heads back into the bathroom to pack her things up. Harry comes over to give his hair a second look.

“Were you worried?” Zayn says to him in a low voice.

Harry drops his hand and tilts his head. “Well, yeah.”

“I mean worried I was doin’ a runner on you.”

Harry laughs. “No. Not at all.” He takes Zayn by the hand and pulls him to his feet. “Ready?”

“Yeah, I’m ready.”

They head into the hall together, and as they turn the corner, they’re accosted by an approaching Louis and Liam — the latter of whom is holding up a phone.

“Niall,” he says, indicating the screen.

“Niall,” Niall repeats tinnily over FaceTime, and waves.

“Hi,” Harry says. “So glad you could join us.”

“Very funny,” Niall says, rolling his eyes. “Who gets married on this short o’ notice? I’m fairly upset with you.”

“No gift, then?” Zayn says.

Niall laughs, and the connection breaks up briefly. “You’ve got no registry!”

“I’m going to set one up,” Harry says apologetically. “It’ll just be like, donate here, donate there, whatever.”

“I’d like an actual present too,” Zayn says. “Buy us some mixing bowls or whatever.”

“Mixing bowls,” Niall repeats, like he’s actually making a mental note of this.

“Not _mixing_ bowls,” Harry whispers. “We’ll never use them...”

“I’ll use them, I cook.”

“Are you saying I don’t cook?”

“Lads,” Louis interrupts.

“What’s the last thing you cooked for us?” Zayn challenges. “Besides smoothies?”

Harry shoots him an offended look.

“Mixing bowls tabled,” Niall loudly interrupts. “Just, uh, wanted to say, y’know, congratulations and all that. Have a lovely day… sorry I can’t be there.”

“Yeah, what’s the deal, Niall?” Liam jokes. “Me and Louis made it to _your_ wedding, and we had like, two newborn babies! Two little premature babies!”

“Yeah, what’s up with that, mate?” Zayn says. “The fuck?”

Niall makes an offended noise, and then his connection stalls, making him freeze for a moment. After a hissing noise from the phone, his voice breaks back in: “ — week’s notice! I’ve got a job, you know!”

“You’re here in our hearts,” Harry shouts. “And we’re having a party in L.A. next month to celebrate, so block that off at the very least.”

“I will!”

Liam slips the phone into his jacket pocket with the screen facing out. “So he can watch the ceremony,” he explains.

“I just love weddings,” Niall says cheerily.

Zayn reaches over and laces his fingers in Harry’s. There’s still music pumping in from outside, but now it’s Shania Twain with _You’re Still The One._ Not Zayn’s taste, but he hugely prefers the message.

“Let’s do this shit,” Zayn says.

Harry smiles at him.

*

When it’s all over and the party has moved half inside the house, with only the drunkest guests left mingling in the backyard and amusing themselves with Gemma’s croquet set, Zayn realizes he hasn’t seen Amir for a bit.

He knows his son pretty well, so he goes around lifting up the tablecloths on each table until he finds him sat underneath one, ripping up grass.

“Hi,” Zayn says, sitting down next to him and tucking the tablecloth behind himself.

“Hi,” Amir says quietly.

“Whatcha doing?”

“Hiding.”

“Hiding, huh? Alright. You enjoy the wedding?”

“Yeah,” Amir says. “It wasn’t as long as Dad’s.”

“Right,” Zayn says. “Good. Didn’t want to bore anyone.”

“It was funnier, too. Nick is funny.”

“Mmm,” Zayn says noncommittally. Nick’s officiant speech was more of a roast than anything. “So what’s up, then? Why’ve you gone into hiding?”

He shrugs. “Just got tired of everybody.”

“Too much attention?”

Amir nods. “Everyone always wants to ask me all these questions, and I don’t wanna answer ‘em.” He pauses. “Mostly I don’t know what the answers are. Like, what does _what are you up to_ mean? I don’t know what I’m up to.”

Zayn laughs. “Yeah, I hear you.”

Amir keeps ripping up grass, not meeting his eyes. “Were you talking to Dad, earlier? Everybody noticed you guys were both missing.”

“Ah… yeah. I was.”

“What’d you talk about?” Amir says, sounding weirdly suspicious.

“Just things about getting married.”

“Like what?”

“Like the sort of things you think about when you do.”

Amir looks up at him. “What things?”

“Oh,” Zayn sighs, “just the sort of promises you’re making, and what they mean, and how you feel. And me and him had been married before, so it’s easier for me to talk to him about things like that, he gets where I’m comin’ from.”

“Is he bummed you’re marrying Harry?” Amir says, his dark eyes owlish.

Zayn laughs. “Nah. I don’t think so.”

“He’s been kind of down lately.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Amir says. “I think the twins make him tired. And us, too, I guess.”

“Five kids is proper hard,” Zayn says. “But he’s very tough, your dad.”

“He can’t be _that_ tough,” Amir says. “He cries a lot.”

Zayn can tell he doesn’t mean this as an insult to Louis. He sounds more worried about him than anything. “He just wears his heart on his sleeve.”

“What’s that mean?” Amir murmurs, looking at the grass again. He picks up a clover flower and starts stripping the individual petals.

“It means he shows what he’s feeling. He doesn’t cry ‘cos he’s not tough. Sometimes it’s tougher to cry.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah,” Zayn says. “‘Cos it means you don’t care if people think less of you for it.”

“Oh,” Amir says, sounding relieved. “Good. ‘Cos I kinda cry a lot too.”

“I know. And that’s alright.”

“Brandon Muncy says I’m a sissy,” Amir says.

“And who the fuck is he?”

“He’s in my class. I think he’s just jealous ‘cos he likes Rachel Taylor, but she likes me.”

Zayn laughs. “Yeah, that’ll do it.”

They’re quiet for a moment.

“Dad?” Amir says. “Can you promise there won’t be anything else changing? At least for a while?”

Zayn knows he can’t really make that promise, but maybe in the short term, here, he can. “All changes’ve been announced,” he promises. “Nothing else new planned.”

“Good.”

*

Louis is over by the drinks table when he spots Zayn pulling Amir out from one of his usual under-the-table hiding spots. He laughs to himself as he pours some lavender lemonade from the jug dispenser, then steps off to the side so the woman behind him can do the same.

He recognizes her as Koya, one of Harry’s fancy friends; he’s met her in passing before. She gives him a smile, then follows his gaze across the back garden. Zayn and Amir have stopped to chat with one of his sisters, and Zayn is idly tousling Amir’s hair as he talks to her.

“Your son, he looks so much like Zayn,” Koya says, in a faintly accented voice.

“He does, yeah,” Louis says. Amir looks like him, too, but no one really notices that, so he’s stopped bringing it up. It just makes him sound defensive. At least with Mia, everyone sees that she has his eyes.

“Does that ever make you sad?” she says.

Louis does a massive double take at her. “Sorry?”

“I’m sorry,” she says, touching his arm. “Not to offend. I’m just curious.”

“No, it doesn’t make me _sad,_ ” he snaps.

Koya shrugs and sips her drink. “I would just find it kind of melancholy, to be reminded of my ex all the time. Especially today, of all days, you know? But maybe it’s poetic, too.”

“‘Scuse me,” Louis says to her, disgruntled, and heads off through the crowd to find Liam.

He runs into Nick instead, like literally runs into him, bumping his drink and spilling it over both of them. They stand there wiping at their suits and apologizing to each other.

“You did a good job, mate,” Louis says. “Funny.”

“Yeah?” Nick says, grinning. He’s clearly drunk. “You like how I took the piss out of Zayn, I bet.”

“In a loving way! It was fine. He laughed, that’s how you know it was genuinely funny.”

“Right, I mean, I took more of the piss out of Harry.” Nick claps him on the shoulder. “So how are you? You look good.”

“You tell me that every time you see me,” Louis says. “Is someone paying you to?”

“I just hardly see you anymore! And I almost can’t believe you’ve had four kids.”

“ _Almost_ , cheers.”

“Well, I can still tell, but only ‘cos of that bit of despair in your eyes,” Nick says sagely.

Louis snorts, but he’s struck with worry, now, that there’s a look on his face everyone but him is noticing. Is he having some sort of involuntary reaction to watching Zayn get married?

Sure, it wasn’t exactly pure joy for him. Yeah, sitting through their vows sort of sucked. He didn’t love listening to Harry talk about how a sober, stable, mature Zayn — the Zayn that Louis never got a chance to be with — had been his rock through dark times, a veiled reference to Harry’s miscarriages over the past year as well as the very public backlash he’d faced when he divorced his royal husband under a cloud of adultery accusations. And he wasn’t exactly over the moon about listening to Zayn talk about how Harry is the longest love story of his life.

But even as Louis was suffering silently through stabs of jealousy, on another, much more important level, he was truly happy for them. Inasmuch as he still loves Zayn, that love has matured into a selfless and supportive one. Louis really is chuffed that they’ve made things work after all this time, that the father of his children is finally in a happy and committed relationship the way Louis himself is. It’s a good thing.

So, is it the lingering grief from what Zayn told him? Maybe, but now that he’s had about an hour to digest it, it really is fine. So twelve years ago Zayn was out mindlessly grinding on and flirting with anonymous people at clubs while Louis was sitting home alone, pregnant, daydreaming about Liam and pining for him. So what? Isn’t that what he always suspected was going on? Does it change anything?

Louis supposes he just hates remembering how he felt, back then. It makes him a bit sick to recall. He was such a wounded, struggling young dad, lashing out, resentful of Zayn, resentful of himself for falling so in love with their baby that he was willing to bring her into the world as the child of a fractured relationship, the child of two boys too immature to be proper dads. In coming home from tour, he had made himself so vulnerable, he could hardly stand it.

It took Zayn proposing to him for Louis to start to truly get over him leaving the band. He was never taken in by Zayn’s big gestures, but if there was one he secretly needed, deep down, that was it. It was an unspoken declaration: _I left the band, not you._

And how many times had Zayn said that exact thing out loud to him? But Louis didn’t care about his words. Marriage isn’t words. Marriage is an act. Maybe that’s why today’s hitting him unexpectedly hard.

“Alright. Thanks for that, Nick,” Louis says to him, breaking out of his thoughts and finding he very much wants to be near Liam. “Where’s me husband?”

Nick turns and scans the crowd, then points. Liam is standing next to a topiary, talking to Jeff Azoff with Niall still on FaceTime in his pocket. Louis strides off toward him the second he spots the (very familiar) back of his head.

“— so I always thought that was funny,” Liam says, wrapping an arm easily around Louis as he walks up without interrupting his sentence or looking away from Jeff. “‘Cos it seems like it shouldn’t work, you know? But it does.”

“Totally know what you mean,” Jeff says.

“What’s up?” Liam says to Louis. “You look narked.”

“Nothing, just keep getting accosted by Harry’s ridiculous friends,” Louis says, then to Jeff: “Not including you. Sorry. Wouldn’t really consider you his _friend_ , though, strictly.”

“I don’t even know which part of that to take personally,” Jeff says, looking amused.

“None of it,” Niall yells from Liam’s pocket, and they all laugh.

They resume their conversation, and Louis nuzzles against Liam, inhaling a noseful of his cologne. Liam is so devoted to him, it almost defies logic; Louis doesn’t want to have any more traitorous microexpressions. He’s let Zayn go, hasn’t he? Liam is the one he’s meant to make his life with. He’s come such a long way from being the fractured, heartbroken 20-something who flew to England just to cry on his mum’s kitchen floor about how he should never have married his babies’ dad.

Liam keeps talking, but strokes Louis’ shoulder, as if he knows exactly what he’s thinking and is telling him it’s alright. He more than likely doesn’t, of course, but the benefit of knowing someone for so long is that even when they don’t know what you’re thinking, they still sort of do.

*

Zayn and Harry are bone-tired by the time they make their way to bed, saying goodnight to the few stragglers like Nick who haven’t headed off yet to homes, hotels or airports and are still lying around drunkenly in Gemma’s sitting room. But they still both want to have sex.

“It’s our wedding night,” Harry says as they undress haphazardly in the darkness. “Right? This is mandatory?”

“Dunno about mandatory, babe,” Zayn says. “Encouraged, maybe.”

He pulls Harry’s trousers down and finds that underneath them, Harry is wearing a red, lacy thong.

“The fuck?” Zayn says, laughing, but his cock throbs at the sight. “You been wearing this all day?”

“All day,” Harry says, and winks at him.

“Criminy.”

Harry collects up their tuxedos and drapes them over a chair in the corner, then returns to Zayn, kissing him hard on the mouth. Zayn moans softly and parts his lips for Harry’s tongue, which pushes its way in gently.

The nice, albeit soul-crushing thing about trying for a baby indefinitely without results means Zayn has spent almost a year and a half getting to fuck Harry raw and come inside him, and it really never gets old. Despite how tired he is and how emotionally fraught the day has been, Zayn is still hard as a rock after about two minutes of kissing and rubbing, and he can just slide right in once he’s ready.

They started trying in May 2026, when Harry’s reproductive endocrinologist gave him the final verdict that, yes, he either needed to freeze his eggs or start trying for a baby immediately if he ever wanted to have a kid, and that freezing his eggs was less likely to work than getting busy ASAP. He came home to Zayn, and they had a very long, exhausting argument, full of Harry intellectualizing his emotions and denying his wants, before he finally broke down and admitted that: his biological clock was ticking; that watching Zayn play with Mia and Amir kept filling him with unbearable pain; that the reason he was afraid of admitting this was that he thought it was too much too soon into the relationship, and he’d scare Zayn away; that a baby might not even happen for them in the end, and Harry was terrified by the prospect of not getting this thing he wants so much.

“You couldn’t scare me off if you came after me with a chainsaw,” Zayn told him. Harry got his birth control implant removed the very next day.

Harry gazes up at him, his angelic lips parted and his stare heavy-lidded. Zayn looks back at him in the darkness as he rocks his hips into the tight squeeze around his cock, ravenously drinking in Harry’s face.

He drops his head into the crook of Harry’s neck, and Harry presses little kisses to his ear as Zayn continues to move in him.

“You’re my husband now,” Harry whispers.

“Yeah love.”

“Mmm…” Harry sticks his tongue inside Zayn’s ear, then, and Zayn jerks, cracking up laughing as tingles shoot up his spine. “I like it.”

“I like it when you’re nasty,” Zayn whispers, sucking at the skin on his throat, faintly tasting his alcohol-free aftershave.

Harry wraps his long legs around him, then his arms, caging Zayn against him like a spider. “I can be nasty for my husband,” he taunts in his low voice. “I can be your little whore, if you like.”

Zayn reaches up and grabs some of his hair, then the sheets in his other hand, so he can move into him more powerfully. “Yeah, I’d like that a lot,” he purrs.

Harry runs his nails up the back of Zayn’s neck. “Why don’t you fuck me harder, then?”

Zayn obeys.

CEDARS SINAI HOSPITAL, SEPTEMBER 15, 2027

“I’m fine,” Harry says, for the twentieth time since Zayn called 911 an hour ago. “I have a stomach flu, or something. I bet it’s ‘cos I picked your kids up at school, and a few mums wanted to meet me, so I got all their kid germs and I didn’t wash my hands until like two hours after.”

Zayn is still pacing back and forth at the foot of his bed, caged by the small emergency exam room — though security did arrange for them to get the more spacious corner suite.

“Come sit,” Harry begs him, from where he’s perched atop the hospital bedsheets in his street clothes.

“I don’t wanna sit,” Zayn snaps. “You could have a brain tumor.”

“Cheers,” Harry says, smiling thinly. “Probably not, though.”

Zayn comes over and sits in one of the terrible plastic chairs near the bed, dragging it closer.

Harry seems in relatively good spirits, despite that he’s been so dizzy he keeps collapsing (he’s buffeted by pillows now, for that reason) and hasn’t been able to keep anything down for the last twelve hours, not even bile. This came on really strong and out of the blue. They got matching tattoos yesterday morning, and were planning a honeymoon trip right up until he got sick.

Zayn reaches out and starts stroking Harry’s arm. He’s queasy with terror, honestly. He keeps thinking that maybe the fertility treatments gave Harry some condition, or rare cancer, or something. With the run of luck they’ve been having, it doesn’t feel completely out of the realm of possibility.

The doctors don’t seem terribly concerned, though, which has to be a good sign, because nobody wants to be the guy that kills Harry Styles. They took some of his blood to test and gave him an IV, since he’s dehydrated. “Just sit tight,” a nurse told them, which pissed Zayn off.

“Just sit tight,” he mocked her in an American accent when she left the room. “Just sit tight, _guys._ ”

“Alright, alright,” Harry shushed him.

Zayn distracts himself by picking up the big plastic hospital remote that’s tethered to the bed and flipping through the channels until he finds something. Oh, _You’ve Got Mail._ Romantic comedy, there you go. He turns to Harry, as if to say, look, I provided for you.

But Harry isn’t looking at the TV — he’s staring into space with round eyes like he’s trying not to barf. Zayn barely has time to get the emesis bin under his face before he’s throwing up bile again.

“Baby,” Zayn says, petting his hair.

“I’m fine,” Harry says hoarsely, wiping his mouth with a tissue. “I think that was it. I can tell my stomach’s empty, it’s cramping like crazy.”

Zayn hits the intercom for the nurse’s station and says, in a fit of blind anger, “Can I get some fuckin’ medical attention for my husband, in room nine? _Thanks_!”

“Zayn,” Harry says, laughing.

“Well, come on! Not fuckin’ waiting around all day, here, like some prick loser off the street… what’s the point of being famous, honestly, if we can’t even get a fucking doctor in when we need one?”

“I’m sure they’re just waiting on my blood test,” Harry says patiently. “Those take time, they’re ruling things out.”

Zayn gets up and paces over to the window, looking out. They have a gorgeous view of the ocean, which is choppy and bright today. Terrible day to be out on the water, but Zayn has the urge to take his boat out anyway. He just wants to escape for a while.

A nurse comes in, then, swishing the curtain loudly aside as she does. She’s looking at a clipboard. Zayn comes back over to Harry, standing at his bedside, a hand around his shoulders. Harry reaches up and takes Zayn’s left hand in his, playing with the wedding band on his finger.

“Hi,” the nurse chirps, stopping in front of Harry. “How are we feeling?”

“As shitty as he was before,” Zayn answers for him. “D’you have any answers for us, or are you just gonna prod him and disappear again?”

She smiles tightly. “Well, I do have a question, actually. Were you aware that you’re about eight weeks pregnant, Harry?”

It’s as if the air has been sucked from the room. Zayn, light-headed, tries to draw a breath and just makes a funny whistling sound instead.

“No,” Harry says, and shakes his head. “No, I can’t be.”

“You can’t be?” she repeats.

“You must’ve gotten mixed up,” he says, a bit hysterically. “I had a miscarriage a few months ago, so maybe you’re seeing hormones left over from that?”

“That’s not really how that works,” the nurse says, not unkindly. “Your bloodwork shows you’re pregnant right now, as we speak.”

“Well maybe you read it wrong,” Harry says hotly.

Zayn, who was feverishly levitating out of his body for a moment there, snaps back to Earth. It almost sounds like Harry doesn’t _want_ to be pregnant.

“Haz, this is great, if it’s true,” he says to him.

“It’s not true,” Harry snaps. The two of them seem to have abruptly switched moods. “Don’t start thinking it’s true, don’t do that to yourself.”

“It is true,” she says, and hands them a piece of paper. Harry grabs it and sits there poring over it; Zayn stares at it over his shoulder. “So that explains the dizziness and nausea. What probably happened is when you got that tattoo yesterday, you shocked your immune system, and it’s been really taxing you ever since… it’s not a good idea to get tattoos when you’re pregnant, but obviously you didn’t know…”

They keep staring at the paper.

“See, your hCG level is in the ten thousands,” the nurse adds helpfully. “That means —“

“I know what it means,” Harry mutters. “But you, um. You all make typos and mistakes and things, don’t you?”

“I’m sure it’s not a mistake?” she says, all uptalky, probably from the strain of being delusionally interrogated by a massive celebrity. “But if you want, I can get an ultrasound tech in?”

Harry hands her back the paper. “Yes please.”

She nods and leaves the room.

Zayn is trying not to let hope overcome him; he keeps reminding himself that they’ll probably lose this one too, that all this likely means is that Harry’s going to have another miscarriage and flame out in grief again.

“We stopped IVF,” Harry says quietly. “I don’t understand.”

“We’ve been having unprotected sex for ages,” Zayn points out, sitting next to him on the bed, nudging him so he budges over a bit. “And they told me I’ve got a really high sperm count.” He likes to bring this up every time he gets the chance.

Harry shakes his head. “But my eggs are shit,” he says. “I’ve barely got any. It’s like a ghost town in there. Just three or four shit eggs sitting around all dusty.”

“Reckon it’s more than three or four,” Zayn says lightly.

Harry laughs, then sobers instantly. “Don’t… I don’t want to go through this again. This is why our doctor made us stop. I can’t do it, I’m not tough enough… maybe I’m just too used to getting what I want, or something, but I can’t bear it. I can’t take any more of it.”

Zayn snakes his arms around him and pulls him in. Harry buries his face in the crook of Zayn’s shoulder, hiding from the world, his wavy hair a curtain around his face.

He stays like that, as physically awkward as it is, when the ultrasound tech comes in and sets everything up and presses the familiar wand to his stomach. Harry doesn’t look, but Zayn does; he cranes his neck over Harry’s shoulder to stare at the screen as a picture appears of a black expanse with a small gray figure inside.

“That’s your baby,” says the tech, whose name badge says Todd. “Eight weeks.”

Zayn has a sudden flashback to a similar moment, twelve years ago, when he flew out to Pittsburgh to see one of Louis’ ultrasounds. He doesn’t remember much from then, except that it was terrifically awkward the entire time and Louis cried after he kissed him in the hallway, but he does remember seeing a fuzzy image of Mia for the first time. It was profound and existentially terrifying, much like this is.

It feels absurd to recall how young they were then. Even now, he doesn’t feel old enough for the awesome might and weight of this responsibility. He wasn’t mature enough to understand the consequences of putting a baby in twenty-three year old Louis that would grow up to be a daughter, and now he isn’t mature enough to understand the consequences of putting babies in thirty-three year old Harry that will never grow up, never live, never be anything.

Maybe this one will. Zayn stares blindly at the image of it, at its large alien head and spindly alien extremities. He wants to hope. But he steels himself against becoming attached to it anyway. You get attached, and then it’s just blood on the sheets, blood that bleach can’t get completely out. Sheets you have to throw away while Harry’s sleeping.

“Is it there?” Harry murmurs. His breath is hot on Zayn’s neck.

“Yeah,” Zayn says.

“Does it look okay?”

“Yes,” Todd answers. “Looks perfectly fine, no abnormalities. Would you like to look?”

Harry tightens his grip on Zayn and doesn’t move his head. “No. No thank you.”

Todd prints them out a 3D image of the baby at Zayn’s quiet request, and hands it over to him. Zayn folds it in half and places it in his back pocket. He isn’t quite sure what he’ll do with it, and Harry certainly won’t want it right now, but he can’t exactly bin it.

By the time Todd rolls the ultrasound machine out of the room, enough tears have leaked down Harry’s cheeks to wet his shirtfront.

Zayn goes and fetches him a cup of water, because he seems like he needs it — he’s blotchy and hiccupy.

Harry drinks fast, then sets the cup down on the little rolling tray by his bed and reaches up with a closed fist to scrub his tears away. His mouth is set in a tight line.

“We’re still adopting that baby,” he says. “No matter what happens.”

“‘Course we are,” Zayn assures him. “No, yeah, I never — she’s yours, mate. Ours, I mean. We’re bringing her home.”

Harry makes a soft, choked noise and nods. “She’s our real baby,” he says. “She’s here, already, she’s alive. Not like this one. Don’t get attached to this thing, please.” His eyes are glassy and bloodshot. “Everything dies inside me. I’m barren.”

“Oh, Haz, no, come on. We don’t know that.”

More tears well, spilling down Harry’s cheeks. “I need you to be here for me, completely,” he says.

“Course. Haven’t I been, so far?”

“I’m afraid we’re gonna run out of rope,” Harry says. “I’m so afraid I’m gonna wear you out until you can’t take it anymore.”

Stung, Zayn takes a moment before he responds. “You’re what I always wanted,” he says. “Spent fifteen years wanting you. I’m here. I’m here. You’re really worried I’m gonna leave you?”

“No,” Harry weeps, shaking his head. “I’m worried you’ll _have_ to, like, for the sake of your kids… I’m worried I’ll go crazy…”

“Not ‘apenning. You’re the last person who’d ever go crazy. You go crazy, we’re all crazy.”

Harry laughs through his tears. “Let me be melodramatic,” he rasps. “I don’t feel well. I’m always melodramatic when I don’t feel well.”

“You should get some sleep,” Zayn says. “You’ve been going through so much shit… you’ve been running yourself into the ground this past month, and you didn’t even know you’ve been pregnant.”

Harry nods, then flashes his teeth in a weak smile. “Y’know… this means I actually _was_ pregnant when we got married.”

Zayn laughs too. “Right.”

“So what’s with you and the shotgun weddings?”

Zayn draws close to him again, nuzzling him, biting his ear. “That’s’ ‘ow we do it where I’m from,” he whispers, making his accent extra syrupy thick for Harry’s pleasure.

“Yeah?” Harry says in a low rumble, rubbing his stubbly jaw against Zayn’s. “You drag nice boys down with you, you bad man?”

“Oi, who’s a nice boy? You? _Louis?_ Please.”

Harry chuckles. Zayn strokes his back and kisses him on the cheek. They fall quiet; Harry’s arms move to cling to him, and Zayn squeezes him, maybe a bit harder than he needs to.

“I have to call Dr Oswald,” Harry says. “He’s not in today, he doesn’t work Wednesdays. It’ll have to be tomorrow. He can probably tell us more.”

He sounds so detached and calm; Zayn’s heart aches for him.

“You don’t have to think about all that right now,” he says.

“I don’t want to just sit around and wait for it to happen again.”

“Lovey… I swear I’ll take care of you, alright? No matter what happens, yeah? We’ll get through it.”

“Okay.”

“We’re married, you’re proper stuck with me.”

Harry laughs again.

CALABASAS, SEPTEMBER 17, 2027

Oswald couldn’t see them until Friday afternoon. Harry spent all of Thursday in a nervous fugue state, running errands and taking calls to keep busy, and meditating in between. Zayn just walked around the house like a ghost, occasionally appearing in whatever room Harry was in and stroking his back and hair in silence while Harry sat there, participating in conference calls zombie-like. When he would remember about the pregnancy and feel an accompanying stab of heartsickness, he’d mute his line and reach up to grab Zayn’s hand.

The baby really is fine, apparently. Oswald tells them it looks entirely normal to him, perfectly sized, placed, labs normal, et cetera. That’s what the doctors said about his first and second pregnancies, too. At least the third one started off bad — he had terrible cramping at three weeks. His reproductive endocrinologist told him they were implantation cramps, but he knew better; he felt like his uterus was about to turn inside out. That baby was physically trying to escape him, like it didn’t want to live.

Harry and Zayn are both silent on the way home. When they’re almost back, cruising along the coast, Harry says, “I’ll pick up your kids today.”

“You don’t have to,” Zayn says immediately, glancing over at him.

“I want to.”

“Harry…”

“Let me do things,” Harry says in a clipped tone. “I have to live my life like normal.”

Zayn rubs at his eyes. “Sorry. I’m just never sure if you want to be around kids or not.”

“Today, I want to be around kids. _Your_ kids, anyway,” he adds.

“Okay. Want me to come with you?”

“No, you take a nap. It’s my fault you were up early, I woke you.”

“Nah,” Zayn lies.

“Oh, you’re normally up at half seven, then?” Harry teases him.

“Sure.”

“Liar.”

Zayn just smiles.

*

Harry thinks he’s doing alright when he gets to Louis and Liam’s. He hasn’t cried all day, not even when he had to look at the ultrasound and see an image of his wee little baby moving around in him, a baby he can’t even hope to bring to life.

And then Louis answers the door with one of the twins in his arms, a sweet-faced sleeping toddler wearing shark-themed footie pajamas with a little fin on the back, and for some reason that just does Harry in. Heat rushes to his face and eyes, prickling him, and he has to bite hard on his lip and look off to his right, at a topiary in his sightline. The blazing Los Angeles sun suddenly feels so hot on the back of his neck.

“Picking up the kids?” Louis says.

“Yeah,” Harry says, in a rush of breathless air.

“Hey...” Louis sounds worried. “You alright, mate?”

Harry takes a deep breath with difficulty and drags his gaze over so it’s at least pointed at Louis’ feet. “Yeah, I, uh…”

Tears start streaming down his face. Shit. And he was doing so well.

Louis grabs for his arm. “Come in, come in.”

The older kids must not be home yet. Louis deftly reaches back to get ahold of the hem of Harry’s shirt and pulls him along into the parlor, while keeping his son balanced in his other arm.

Harry, numb, allows himself to be guided into a chair. He can’t see too well from crying, but he hears Louis setting the kid down on a sofa with a groan, and then the sound of a minifridge opening.

“You want a water?” Louis says.

“Yeah. Please.” He wipes his eyes.

Louis comes over and hands him one. Harry looks at the bottle, wanting to say something about single-use plastics, but he just uncaps it and drinks half instead. “Thanks,” he says hoarsely. Inside in the AC, his tears are cooling rapidly on his face.

“Is everything alright?” Louis says, as he settles back down on the couch.

Harry nods and glances up at him, finally. Louis’ pale eyes are worried, and they keep searching his face.

“It’s just, y’know,” he says. He can’t tell Louis he’s pregnant; he can’t tell anyone. Seeing hope on other people’s faces would kill him. It’s hard enough seeing it on Zayn’s.

Louis nods. “I know.”

“Is that Max?” he says, wiping his eyes. “Or Patrick?”

“Oh,” Louis says, looking down at his son beside him and stroking his short-cropped blonde hair. “Max. I ‘ad them both napping, but this one is sick, so he can’t sleep well if he’s not bein’ cuddled. I dunno why he gets like that, when he’s sick. Liam thinks we shouldn’t baby him, but he’s little, he doesn’t understand why he can’t be held all the time.” He looks back up at Harry, stricken. “Oh, mate, I’m sorry. Am I being a huge prick right now?”

“Wot,” Harry says. “Making me think about a baby?”

“Well, yeah.”

Harry sniffs. “Would you actually mind if I, ah… if I. Um. Could — could I hold him?” he says, his voice wobbling.

He didn’t even know until he said it that that was what he wanted, but it is. Just in this moment, he wants to badly to have a little person in his arms, to be nurturing and comforting.

“Absolutely,” Louis says, scooping Max up, his sleeping head lolling.

He brings him over to Harry, and Harry leans back against the pillow behind him, taking the warm weight of him. Max stirs and makes a sound, but then he settles against him, fisting a little hand in Harry’s shirt. Harry presses a kiss to Max’s head, tears flowing freely.

Louis sits a few feet away, watching him and looking pained.

“I’m fine, seriously,” Harry chokes out. They both laugh. “No, this is helping.”

“Good, lad.”

“I wanted to go see the baby we’re trying to adopt,” he says, “but her foster mum, uh. She thinks I should try not to see her ‘til we get the results of our home study. Thinks I’m getting too attached too soon.”

“Oh, Harry…”

“Nah. Reckon she’s right.”

Max stirs again, and Harry shifts him in his arms, supporting his head better. Max opens his eyes for a moment, flashing one dark and one bright blue, and then he beams sleepily and giggles before letting his head fall back against Harry’s chest. One chubby-fingered hand reaches up and clumsily wipes at the tears on his cheek.

Harry smiles at him, heartened and heartbroken all at once.

“I think he likes you,” Louis whispers.

“Doesn’t he like everybody?”

“Aw, it still counts, though.” Louis is quiet for a moment. “You been alright, though? You and Zayn?”

“Been fine.”

“How’s married life?”

“Same as not-married life.”

Louis nods. “Pretty much how I felt after, yeah.”

Harry sniffs again. He’s barely engaged in this conversation; all he’s trying to do is match his breathing to Max’s and stay perfectly in the moment. No sadness, no yearning, no grieving. Just being here.

“I was a bit worried,” Louis says. “After what happened a few months ago.”

This takes a moment to penetrate. “What happened in June, you mean? When Zayn came over here?”

Louis hesitates. “Yeah.”

“You don’t have to worry about me and him,” Harry murmurs. “And him coming over here like that was a one-time thing. Sorry we brought you into the middle of things, but it won’t happen again.”

The way he says it is friendly, but it’s also an unmistakable warning: _don’t act like a husband to my husband._ He feels even more possessive than normal right now, knowing he’s pregnant and probably due for a fourth miscarriage.

Most of the time he doesn’t care that Louis has just happened to collect five kids, three of them not even intentional, just a result of his seemingly boundless fertility, and one of them a very sweet little girl who was dumped in his lap by circumstance with no work on his part. Louis didn’t have to suffer through the indignity and uncertainty of adoption to get Sunday, the universe just handed her to him, but he can have all that. That’s fine. Harry doesn’t begrudge him his good luck. It’s only when Zayn starts sniffing around Louis, wanting to be comforted and babied by him, wanting to be here in this warm bright house full of children (two of them his own biological children), that Harry starts getting irrationally jealous and resentful.

“Okay,” Louis says. “Just wanted to let you know I’m here if you need me.”

Harry strokes Max’s hair. “I know,” he says. “I appreciate it.”

MALIBU, NOVEMBER 6, 2027

Zayn’s Malibu place has a glass-enclosed patio that looks out over the beach; the kids often sit out there to read or do homework or text their little pals. That’s where he and Harry find them mid-morning on Sunday, when they go looking for the kids to tell them about the baby.

Amir is listening to music with headphones in while he texts, and Mia is reading one of the books from that girl detective series she likes so much. A rare shower is passing over Los Angeles, and rain is pattering on the glass. They look peaceful.

“Maybe now isn’t the right time,” Zayn murmurs to Harry in the doorway.

“When, then?” Harry whispers back. “They go back to Louis in a few hours, and you’ve been putting me off all weekend.”

“I know, I know.”

“I am starting to look a bit, y’know...” Harry makes a convex gesture over his stomach with his hands.

“I sort of want to wait ‘til they’re narked at me about somethin’ else and then just slap this on top.”

“Since when are you afraid of your kids?”

“I’m not afraid, I’m exhausted,” Zayn whispers. “You’ve been keeping me up tossing and turning all night, and I know Amir’s gonna scream bloody murder about this like we’ve told him we’re shippin’ him off to military school, and I just don’t think I fuckin’ have it in me.”

He has a nauseating mix of emotions about Amir’s attitude toward him, lately: parental guilt and petulant hurt, plus worry that this bitterness about being abandoned for a summer is going to do some permanent harm to his sensitive little son.

Selfishly, he really wants Amir to just move past it. He’s mature enough to know that he can’t tell him the truth, but not mature enough to be totally self-sacrificing about it. He resents being punished for this, being punished for not wanting to grieve and be mentally unwell right in his children’s faces. Fuck’s sake.

Zayn does take Amir for granted sometimes. Mia has always been more of a handful — full of unvarnished questions, demands, and energy. Amir’s been easier, in particular for Zayn, because he’s happily agreed to most everything he said. But Mia didn’t take Zayn’s absence this summer personally, and Amir did.

Now his pre-teen angst is bubbling together with resentment, making a putrid boiling stew of defiance that Zayn just knows is going to shoot out at him when he announces the baby news. Amir is already resentful enough about the twins’ existence; with Zayn bringing two other new siblings into his life, he’ll probably feel like he’s being pushed out entirely.

Zayn’s been trying so hard to apologize, he really has. He’s been taking Amir on nature hikes, just the two of them, so they can look at leaves and little animals together. He spends hours painting with the kids in the art room, his phone turned off and his watch off his wrist. And, yeah, sure, he already likes doing those things, but he’s done other stuff too. He bought a piano and had Louis reschedule one of Amir’s weekly piano lessons to Saturdays at his house. He’s trying.

“I’m sure you’re exaggerating,” Harry says.

“Harry…”

Harry nudges him. “We’ll do it quick and then it’s done. Rip off the plaster.”

Mia tears her gaze away from her book and glances over at them from the couch. “Why are you guys looking at us and whispering?” she calls.

Zayn clears his throat. “Grab your brother and meet us in the sitting room in ten minutes,” he says. “We’re ‘aving a family meeting. I’ll make some snacks.”

Mia looks confused. “We don’t have family meetings here,” she says. “Dad and Liam have family meetings, not you guys.”

“Well, we’re gonna start,” Zayn says firmly. “What snacks you want?”

“Hummus? And crudités.”

“Alright. Coming right up.”

*

In the kitchen, Harry keeps stealing pepper slices the second Zayn cuts them. The fifth time, Zayn slaps his hand away.

Harry softly exclaims in offense. “How dare you deny me anything right now, especially peppers,” he says. “They have folic acid. I need folic acid.”

“You’re taking folic acid,” Zayn says, without even looking up from the cucumber he’s slicing.

“But every vitamin is more effectively absorbed when it’s in your food. That’s science.”

“Well, you can eat the shit _after_ I’ve cut it up, so.”

“I’m hungry now,” Harry counters.

“Alright,” Zayn relents, crumbling immediately. He tosses a few handfuls of the already-cut vegetables in a bowl and passes them down the counter to Harry, then reaches over and presses his hand to his stomach, which is momentarily concealed beneath a baggy Harvard sweatshirt that Harry was given as a gag gift by some Swiss friend of his.

Harry clasps his hand over Zayn’s, and Zayn looks up at him; he looks happy.

“I’m actually sort of excited to tell them,” Harry says in a little voice.

Now Zayn feels like a complete bellend. Harry’s been so frightened to tell anyone about the baby, the fact that he’s this eager to tell Zayn’s kids is massive progress, and he’s over here bitching about it.

“Me too,” Zayn says. He rubs his thumb against Harry. He isn’t showing too much yet, but it’s noticeable when he’s tightly clothed, and noticeable to the touch. A little secret between the two of them, becoming less of a secret now.

Harry has started unfolding in the last week or so, like a paper crane. He’s spent months hunched in around himself, miserable, hiding behind a blank and gleaming smile or hiding under the covers of their bed. Just for the last few days has he been walking tall like he normally does, spreading that warm and powerful energy that Zayn doesn’t even realize he missed so much.

“Oh,” Harry says, jarring them out of their happy moment standing there absentmindedly rubbing his tummy. “I had something funny to show you.”

He pulls his phone from his pocket and taps a few times, then hands it to Zayn. It’s a photo of an inTouch sidebar, with their faces side-by-side, and Taylor Swift’s in a tiny bubble below Zayn’s. Headline: PREGNANCY SHOCKER SENDS ZAYN RUNNING TO HUBBY’S EX! Subhead: “ _I’ll raise this baby alone!_ ”

Zayn starts laughing; he can’t help himself. “Fucking… alright, then. They do love that angle, don’t they?”

“Actual story’s a bit tortured,” Harry says. “Very cut and paste. The quality of their writers has really gone downhill.”

“So is it out that you’re pregnant, then?” Zayn says. “My reps haven’t said anythin’.”

Harry shrugs. “It’s so hard to say, ‘cos they’ve been pushing out stories on how I’m pregnant like once a month since I came out as an omega. And this year’s been worse, since, y’know, I _have_ been, so I’ve looked it a bit in the face, and not been doing things or going places or drinking, which tips people off. Plus, we just rushed a wedding, so everyone’s going to speculate on that.”

“And technically they’ll be right.”

“Yeah, don’t you hate that?” Harry says. “Just them being right. I hate giving anyone that satisfaction of thinking they know what’s going on, they act so smug.”

“Let ‘em be smug,” Zayn says, cupping his other hand to Harry’s middle, making him smile. “What d’you think this is, in here?”

“I think it might be a baby,” Harry jokes.

“Boy or girl, like.”

“What d’you want?” Harry says, wrapping his hands around Zayn’s wrists, bringing his tattooed hands higher on his belly.

Zayn strokes him with light finger touches. “Boy,” he says honestly. “‘Cos of Toni. Then we’d have a girl and a boy.”

“Yeah? You want another boy?”

“Nah, girls are nice, I guess,” Zayn says. “I’d be quite alright with three girls. Might be interesting to have another boy, though… Amir isn’t very boyish.”

“You think so? He likes lizards, and skateboarding, and he roughhouses.”

“Yeah, but that’s sort of superficial kid things. Who he is deep down, y’know, is like, artistic, and sensitive. I see other boys with frogs and lizards and whatever, they squeeze ‘em and poke ‘em and shit. He just stays still and lets ‘em sit on his hand.”

Harry smiles. “What, so you’d rather have a boy who’s _not_ artistic and sensitive? ‘Cos I quite like that about him.”

“Not at all. Just wonder what I’m missing, I dunno.”

“You know what you’re missing, it’s what Louis’ got — little hellions, tearing up their house.”

“Good point,” Zayn says. “Never mind, fuck that. I like my quiet house.”

“I sort of hope it’s a girly girl, or Toni is,” Harry says. “I know it’s sort of stupid, but I really want to dress a baby up in little outfits. Feel like that’s half the fun of a baby.”

Zayn laughs. As broody as Harry’s been, he’s still adorably naive about what having an actual baby is like. He talks about it rather like they’re getting a couple of puppies. “Nah, but you can do that with boys. I used to do that with Amir all the time, ‘cos he was more patient about it than Yas. We put little turtlenecks and chains on him, and things. He looked like baby Young Thug.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Harry says. “I remember the pap photos of him. Very on-trend baby.”

“Exactly.”

“Hey, by the way,” Harry says, looking sort of uneasy. “Obviously this, uh, came with the mail…” He taps the magazine. “And I noticed… amongst the mail… that you’ve got another letter from the IRS?”

Zayn sighs. “I know. It’s just my fuckin’ back taxes.”

“D’you want me to just take care of those for you?”

“Nah. It’s not that much, I’ve just been illiquid for a bit. It’s…” He gestures. “This house, plus I haven’t got much cash coming in, with all we’ve had going on.”

Harry looks guilty. “Look, we’re married,” he says. “Your taxes are my taxes.”

“Nah, look, I’ll free up some money. It’s only laziness that I haven’t already done. I don’t want you payin’ my debts, that’s just… it’s not in your remit. I’ll get liquid, take care of a few things, then we’ll get you an engagement ring, yeah? Why don’t you go ahead and put a couple aside at Samer Halimeh, and I’ll pick one up when I can?”

“But how much do you owe?” Harry says. “‘Cos they must be absolutely hammering you on the interest.”

Zayn’s about to hedge on this when Mia shouts from down the hall, “DAD! Where are you guys? We’re bored!”

“Hang on,” Zayn shouts back at her. Relieved for the interruption, he drops his hands and turns back to the counter, piling the food onto a wood tray.

They’re already perched beside each other on the large white couch when Zayn climbs up the two steps into the sitting room, Harry on his heels. Their house is open plan on the first floor — spacious and oddly bisected with tiny staircases, random doorless walls, mirrors and bookshelves everywhere — which sometimes makes it feel like living in a spy thriller. You can never tell where anyone’s voice or steps are coming from.

Zayn sets the tray down on the coffee table in front of the kids.

“Is this a bribe?” Amir says, flicking a suspicious look between the two of them.

“No,” Zayn says, laughing. “Don’t be so dramatic.”

Mia doesn’t seem to care if it is a bribe or not — she’s already piling pepper slices onto a napkin and dipping them with abandon. “So what’s this meeting about?” she says. “Is it the baby you’re adopting? ‘Cos we already talked about that.”

“Ah,” Zayn says, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. “No, I think we’ve covered that fairly well.”

Amir stares at Zayn with worry on his face. He’s usually Zayn’s spitting image, but right now, he looks like Louis. The self-protective set of his jaw, the doleful, narrowed eyes — it’s all Louis.

“It’s actually nice news,” Zayn says. “It is. Um… Harry’s actually pregnant, as well. He’s gonna have a baby.”

Their little faces drop. Mia drops the pepper she was about to bite back onto the napkin.

“Why?” she says.

“What d’you mean, _why?_ ” Zayn rejoinders.

Amir just sits there, staring mutinously into space.

“I mean, you’re adopting a baby,” she says, with an air of _duh._ “Why are you doing both at the same time?”

“That’s for us to decide,” Zayn says.

“I thought we were a family,” Amir snaps.

Zayn turns in exasperation to Harry, who’s silent and looking guilty.

“This is a good thing,” he repeats to his kids.

“It’s good that you’re gonna have less time for us?” Amir says. “And be super tired from having two babies to take care of, like Dad is? And, like, miss my recitals, and Mia’s games, ‘cos you have to do baby stuff?”

“Amir,” Zayn says in a warning tone.

“No, this is bullshit,” Amir says, getting up and walking away, around the end of the couch and toward the door to the patio. “I’m so _tired_ of this! Just everyone stop having babies!”

“AMIR,” Zayn bellows, but he’s gone outside, letting the door slam shut behind him.

He moves to get up, but Harry stops him.

“Maybe let him blow off some steam for a moment,” Harry whispers.

“He can’t think he’s allowed to speak to me or you like that.”

“No, but I think it’s a lesson better learned if he has a moment to reflect and feel guilty.”

“I don’t care what he feels! He’s the child, I’m the adult, he needs to understand that!”

Mia clears her throat, and Zayn starts; he’d forgotten she was still there.

“Hi,” he says. “D’you think this is _bullshit_ , too?”

“No,” Mia says. “I mean, I’m surprised, but I’m not mad.”

Zayn sighs.

“I am happy for you guys,” she adds. “It’s good news. And I’m glad it’s Harry and not some rando who sucks. I like Harry.”

Harry laughs. “Thank you.”

Zayn gazes at his firstborn. “You’re not gettin’ pushed out,” he says. “I promise. I’m not making a replacement family.”

“No, no,” Harry says in a soft voice. “That isn’t it at all.”

Mia smiles. He sees the Louis in her even more than he did in Amir. “I know.”

Harry reaches out and takes Zayn’s hand, lacing his fingers in his.

“Amir ran away mad when Dad told us him and Liam were pregnant, too,” Mia adds. “Don’t feel bad. He’s just a big drama queen. So, like, how pregnant are you?” she says to Harry, with a mischievous twinkle in her eye. “I could kind of tell, but I thought you were just like, giving up on life and getting a little fat.”

“Yasmeen,” Zayn says, exasperated, while Harry chokes on another laugh.

“No, just pregnant,” Harry says. “Four months.”

“Wow,” she says. “Wait, when do you adopt the baby?”

“We should be able to bring her home early next year,” Zayn says.

Mia thinks about this. “That’s gonna suck,” she says. “Newborn baby after newborn baby.”

“I’m actually looking forward to it,” Harry counters in his gentle way.

Mia swings her legs back and forth, kicking the couch with her sock feet. “Can we come to the hospital and visit the baby like we did with Dad and the twins?”

“Yes, ‘course,” Zayn says.

“I’m actually gonna have the baby here at home,” Harry says, utterly serene. “No hospital. But of course I want you two —”

This is entirely new information to Zayn, who interrupts: “You’re doing _what_?”

Harry squeezes his hand a bit harder than he normally would. “I’ve mentioned this,” he says.

“Nah, mate, I think I’d remember that one.”

Even harder squeeze. “We can discuss it later.”

“The baby’ll be like me!” Mia chirps. “I was born in a car.”

“That you were,” Harry says. “And you’re perfectly fine, aren’t you?”

“Yeah! Dad delivered me.”

“He did,” Harry agrees.

“Yeah, but not on purpose though,” Zayn says queasily. “Not, like… we ain’t planned it, like. I didn’t want to. It was an emergency situation, y’know.”

Harry squeezes his hand again. Is he going to make him Zayn deliver _this_ baby, too? How many humans is he going to have to pull out of other humans, like some sort of grotesque magician? Maybe he should get a vasectomy after this, just to be safe.

“Soo, wait, did you guys have to get married so fast ‘cos Harry was pregnant?” Mia says.

“No,” Harry says quickly.

“That’s not a polite question, Yasmeen,” Zayn says. “You don’t ask things like that.”

“Sorry! I was just wondering.”

“We got married ‘cos we wanted to,” Harry says. “I promise.”

Zayn gets to his feet, stretching. “On that note, I’m gonna go make sure my son hasn’t run down the beach and flung himself in the ocean.”

“He wouldn’t,” Mia says, laughing. “He doesn’t like getting his hair wet.”

“Neither does this one,” Harry says, pointing at Zayn.

Zayn makes a noncommittal noise as he heads for the patio. As he slides the glass door open, he hears Mia say to Harry, “Have you been puking a lot?”

*

Amir did go down the patio stairs to the beach, but he hasn’t flung himself into the ocean. He’s just sitting in the sand, his knees pulled to his chest and his chin resting on them. It’s no longer raining, but there are wet drops on the gray fabric of his hoodie, like it only just stopped a moment ago.

Zayn walks tentatively up beside him and takes a seat next to him. Amir doesn’t look at him. He’s staring out at the sea, his jaw hard.

He looks older, lately. He’s shot up a bit in height, and he’s at a sort of gangly stage, with the baby fat thinning from his cheeks. It always makes Zayn happy just to look at him, to marvel at how much he’s grown.

“D’you mind if I join you?” Zayn says.

Amir shrugs. “You already are, so.”

Zayn reaches over and runs his hand over Amir’s back, giving him enough of a gentle shove to sway him back and forth. “Don’t be like that, ey? Don’t be so hard on me. You know how much I love you, alright?”

Amir pulls his hood up over his head.

“Amir...”

“Leave me alone,” he mumbles.

“You were rude to me in there, y’know,” Zayn says. “You hurt my feelings. Hurt Harry’s feelings.”

“Sorry.”

“You can apologize to Harry as well, when we go back to the house.”

Amir groans, flopping over on his side in the sand.

“Amir,” Zayn says sharply.

“You _promised_ ,” he accuses. “You said nothing else would change!”

“I shouldn’t’ve made that promise. It was stupid of me, and I apologize. That’s nothing I can guarantee. Life is full of changes, Amir.”

“But it’s not fair,” Amir says. “Harry’s like, just suddenly our family, out of nowhere? ‘Cos you just decided to marry him and have babies with him after like, two years? You’re _just_ like Dad! Why’d you have to go get a new family so fast?”

“No one’s getting a new family. Come on, love. I’m just making ours bigger.”

Amir’s quiet for a moment. Zayn reaches out and puts a hand to his shoulder again, rubbing him cajolingly.

“I thought you’d be different,” Amir mutters. “I thought it could just be like, the three of us for a while, on days you had us. I thought we could keep just coming to your house and chill and do fun stuff... not have babies around, or a stepdad.”

“That’s not fair to me,” Zayn says. “I can’t only be the fun house for you to escape to. I’m human, Amir, I’ve got needs. Harry and I love each other.”

“Yeah,” Amir says sourly. “I know. And you’ll have your baby with him that’s not a stupid mistake you made like me and Mia are.”

“Stop it with that. Are you kidding me with this shit? Have I ever said you’re a mistake?”

“It’s just gonna be, like — that’ll be your family now. Seven days a week.”

“You’re my family, Amir. You and your sister will always be my family, my kids. And Louis’ still my family, too.” His voice gets a little husky as he says, “I sincerely dunno what to tell you. I want so badly for you to believe me… I wanted you to be excited about this.”

“It’s just so much,” Amir says quietly. “It’s like, so soon.”

Zayn reaches up and pulls his hood back, exposing his face. Amir so much resembles Zayn’s younger self, it’s almost painful to look at him.

“I’m sorry,” Zayn says to him. “I’m no good at this. I never ‘ad no stepdad, myself, half-siblings, any of it. Maybe you ought to talk to your dad, or Harry.”

Amir laughs in a sniffly way and shrugs. “Maybe.”

“But I don’t feel like you’re any less my son ‘cos I see you less now. I’m here whenever you need me. If you want to swap up custody or something, down the road… if you want to spend a whole summer with me, something like that… I’m open to talking about that. I just want to get settled first with everything else that’s going on.”

Amir looks up at him in wary hope, then after a moment, snuggles up to him. Zayn wraps an arm firm around his shoulders. Meters away, the ocean is softly crashing against the shore, sending a stiff breeze their way despite the heat of the day.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you this summer,” Zayn says. “I’m trying to make it up to you. Been trying.”

Amir squirms. “Don’t try so hard,” he says. “It makes me feel like you just want me to stop being mad.”

“Well,” Zayn says in exasperation. “What am I meant to do, then?”

“Just let me be mad! Don’t tell me how I’m supposed to feel!”

“You know what,” Zayn says, his temper flaring, “when I was only seven years older than you, I left my whole fuckin’ family and went on the road for five years, and I had no adults looking out for me, just narcissists sucking me dry at every opportunity! Few years later I bought my family a house! You don’t understand that, it means nothing to you, ‘cos money means nothing to you, and that’s my fault. ‘Cos I worked so fuckin’ hard that now my own son can’t even respect ‘ow hard I worked —“

“This isn’t about that!”

“Yes, it bloody well is. It bloody well is, ‘cos you don’t take what I say at face value, you scoff at me, you think you run the show or something. You think I’d ever talk to _my_ dad like this?”

Amir leaps to his feet. “Why am I not allowed to be mad at you?” he demands.

“‘Cos it’s unsafe for you to go through life angry and distrustful of the people who care most about you!” Zayn screams back. “Most people aren’t looking out for you! Most people want to throw you to the wolves! You grow up resenting me, thinking I’m shit, you’re gonna turn to the first shithead who wants to manipulate you and let them ruin your life!”

“I don’t even know what that _means!”_

“You will someday, alright?”

Amir stands there, tearful, looking like he’s struggling for words.

“Look, here’s all I’m trying to say,” Zayn says, exhaling a deep breath. “You’re angry ‘cos you feel abandoned, pushed aside, yeah? And all I’m trying to say is I’d never abandon you, never push you aside.”

“But you’ll be someone else’s dad,” Amir says, tears spilling down his cheeks. “Two kids’ dads, seven days a week, and not mine. You’ll never be my dad all the time, ever again. I’m always gonna be a second thought.”

“No. Never a second thought.” Zayn thumps his chest with his palm. “You and Yasmeen are right here, always. Think about you a thousand times a day.”

“But Harry’s your _real_ husband. Not Dad. So you must not have loved Dad as much as you love him.”

“Amir,” Zayn says, and a pang of fatigue strikes him. He drops his head into his hands and sighs, then looks up again, at sniffling Amir with his arms wrapped around himself to hide from the ocean chill. “That just isn’t true.”

“I know Dad wanted the divorce,” Amir says. “He told Mia that. So, fine. But if he left you, why are you so okay moving on? I get why _he_ is.”

“You wanted me to just be alone forever?” Zayn says.

“Not alone! You have me!”

“Two, three days a week, sweetheart.”

“But you could’ve had me all the _time_ ,” Amir chokes out, wiping at his snotty nose. “You could’ve asked Dad if you could have more custody of me, when he had the twins. He’d’ve probably said yes. But you got with Harry, and it was like the same thing Dad did. You just got a new life instead of trying to fix what you already had! And then I get nothing!”

“I could take more custody of you _now_! I just offered exactly that!”

“But I don’t want it now! I wanted my _dad_ , I wanted it to be just the two of us, I didn’t want a stepdad and stupid babies! I thought you would understand! You’re like the one person I thought would freaking understand!”

“Amir,” Zayn interrupts. “You need to realize that you can’t get everything you want in life. Sometimes shit is just not fair. Sometimes you just have to suck it up and power through. Neither me or Louis has done anythin’ to you to hurt you on purpose. We love you. We just can’t put our own lives on hold forever.”

Amir shakes his head and looks away, off toward the dense thicket of trees that surrounds the house, like he’s thinking about dashing off to get lost in the woods. Zayn feels an urge to reach up and seize him around the wrist.

“But why’s it not fair to _me_ ,” he cries. “It’s fair to the twins. It’s fair to _your_ kids. It’s not fair to me and Mia. Or, like, Sunday, she barely has a mom, how’s that fair? But all these other stupid kids get two parents all the time!”

“Who’s stupid?” Zayn says gently. “Are you that angry at the twins?”

“Well, they’re annoying!”

Zayn can’t help laughing; he fields a glare from Amir and puts his hands up. “I’m not laughin’ _at_ you, I promise…” He takes in a deep breath and shifts on the sand, gathering his thoughts. “Look, it wouldn’t’ve been fair to you kids for me and Louis to stay married. We’d have been unhappy. You wouldn’t want to grow up in a house like that.”

Amir sniffles.

“And it wouldn’t be fair to you, either, for us to live like monks and be unhappy for how lonely we‘d be. Don’t I seem happier now than I did before Harry?”

Amir mops away tears with his hoodie sleeve. “I guess. Before this year, you did. Now you seem sad again.”

“Well, he and I’ve gone through some sad things this year,” Zayn says. “And when you’re older I’ll tell you about them, and maybe you’ll understand.”

Amir scoffs. “Maybe.”

“Can I have a hug, _beta_?”

Amir sets his jaw again and shoots Zayn a suspicious look like he’s toying with the idea of refusing, but in the end he comes over and collapses into Zayn’s arms the way he did when he was younger.

Zayn hugs Amir to himself, hard, and press a kiss to his head. His heart is aching in his chest. He wishes Amir knew. He wishes he could understand. It’s so hard, all of this, and he has no answers. It comes so much easier to Louis, all of this blended family stuff. He just knows more intuitively what their kids need and want to hear.

“I love you,” Zayn tells his son.

“Whatever,” Amir says brattily, even as he’s clinging to Zayn like a monkey.

“You believe me?” Amir doesn’t respond, so Zayn jostles him a little. “C’mon, huh? You were my best man. You’re my best little lad. Don’t leave me hang like that.”

“Yeah,” Amir says in a small voice. “I believe you.”

“You love me?”

“Yeah, I love you.”

*

“Those,” Mia says, leaning over Harry’s shoulder to tap the touchscreen of his phone and pull up a pair of Golden Goose sneakers on Net-A-Porter. “Those are the ones Zaira has.”

Harry nods. “They’re cute. What size are you?”

“Um… a six? A small six.”

“Alright. This is Italian sizing, so thirty-six, I guess?”

“Sure, go with that.”

Harry obliges, adds them to his cart, and hits purchase with a decisive tap of his thumb. “Done. They’ll be here by next Thursday, you can get them then.”

Mia can hardly believe her luck. She was just teasing Harry when she asked him to give her a present for being nice about the baby, but Harry pulled out his phone right then and there and said, “What do you want?” He just seemed so relieved that she wasn’t throwing a tantrum like Amir.

She hugs him around the neck as he sets the phone back down on the coffee table. “You’re my favorite stepdad.”

“Oh, sure,” Harry says, sounding amused. “At least until the next time Liam buys you something.”

“He never buys me shoes! Only charms for my charm bracelet.”

“You wear a charm bracelet?”

“I don’t usually, ‘cos soccer,” Mia says, flopping back down on the couch next to Harry. “I keep it in my room. But I wore it to your guys’s wedding.”

Harry nods. “I was a bit distracted that day,” he says, then kicks his feet up on the table, leans back against the couch and brings his hands to his stomach, running them gently over the curve under his sweatshirt.

Mia keeps watching him in curiosity until he notices her looking and says, “Wanna feel?”

She shrugs. “Maybe.”

“You can if you like.”

“It’s kind of creepy,” she says. “Like, cool, but creepy. It was super weird when my dad was pregnant, ‘cos sometimes you could feel both the twins at the same time.”

Harry smiles at her. He looks tired, but happy. “It’s your little sister in here,” he says. “Or brother.”

Mia smiles back at him, then stretches a hand out to touch him. All she feels is kind of a firm squishiness, not too much unlike what a regular stomach feels like.

“Does it move yet?” she says, pressing down on him in an attempt to locate the baby. “Like, can you feel it?”

“I haven’t yet,” Harry says, his voice emotionless. “Still waiting.”

“Are you supposed to be able to?”

“It depends.”

“But like, how do you know the baby’s okay?”

Harry’s quiet for a moment. “Baby’s apparently okay,” he says softly. “I go to the doctor a lot.”

Mia nods. “That’s good. What about you? Do you feel crappy? Besides puking?”

“Not too bad. I have a lot of heartburn, though.”

Mia takes her hands away from Harry and sandwiches them under her legs. “I don’t think I’ve ever had heartburn.”

“Count yourself lucky.” Harry laces his hands together and rests them in his lap, clearing his throat. “Listen… I’d like if we could do some bonding things. You and me, and your brother.”

Mia eyes him. “Like what?”

“Well, whatever you’d like to do.”

“Aren’t we bonded?” she sasses him.

Harry smiles. “I think so, but I’d like to be a bit closer,” he says. “Now that we’ve got babies on the way. Is there anything you like to do that Zayn doesn’t, that maybe we could do together?”

“Leave the house,” Mia says.

Harry laughs. “Right, I knew about that one.”

Mia swings her legs some more, thinking. “I dunno off the top of my head,” she says. “Can I think about it and tell you later?”

“Of course.”

“Okay, good.” She pauses for a while. “Harry?”

“Yeah.”

“I know I asked you this before, but like… are you and my dad definitely okay?”

“Yes,” Harry says firmly.

Mia wants to believe him. “It’s just sometimes you look really distracted and sad.”

Harry fixes her with an intent look. “Do I?”

“Yeah,” Mia says, worrying at her lip with her teeth. “And Dad does, too. And it’s new, you didn’t used to get like that. Well, you didn’t. Dad did. But I feel like he’s been even sadder than usual lately.”

He shakes his head. “We’re fine.”

“You sure?”

“Yes. I promise.”

*

Their drive back is quiet. Amir is listening to music again, and staring out the backseat window; Mia sits up front, but she’s engrossed with texting her friends.

Zayn senses an opportunity when she puts her phone down for a moment. “Hey,” he says, softly. “Could you, um… just talk to your brother about this, a bit? Make sure he doesn’t take it so hard?”

Mia looks over at him, but he doesn’t take his eyes off the road, even though the car’s self-driving. “I dunno,” she says. “He hasn’t been listening to me lately. I don’t think he cares what I think so much, anymore.”

“Yeah, no, he does.” Zayn glances in the rearview to make sure Amir isn’t listening. “He looks up to you. Please?”

“Sure, Dad.”

“Thank you, love.”

They’re quiet. Zayn twiddles his fingers on the steering wheel as lunch hour Calabasas traffic creeps along through the lush green canyon.

“Are you alright about it?” Zayn says. “The baby?”

“What would you do if I wasn’t?” Mia retorts. “Punch Harry in the stomach?”

Zayn is so shocked by this, he can feel the blood drain from his entire face before it goes numb. His throat dries out, and he wants to shout at her, more than he ever has before for one of her flip comments.

She doesn’t know, she has no idea, she didn’t mean it, he reminds himself. She’s just at an age where she thinks that sort of thing is funny. She runs with a pack of mean rich girls that were raised by nannies and say those sort of fucked-up, snide things. And she’s been saying even more fucked-up things than usual, lately. Zayn isn’t sure if it’s just a phase, or if she’s acting out because he’s been gone and Louis has been so distracted — she tends to veil her acting out more than Amir does.

“That’s not even a little bit funny,” Zayn says sharply, once he’s regained control of himself. “I didn’t bring you up to say nasty shit like that. You need to learn to read the room, Yas, ‘cos you really are going to end up hurting someone someday with these comments of yours.”

“Sorry!” Mia exclaims, kicking her little high-topped feet up on the dashboard. “I just meant, like, it is what is is, right?”

“So am I meant to take that as you’re not alright with it?”

“No, I am!” Mia says. “I’m happy about it. I was surprised, is all. Like, I get why Amir reacted like that.”

“And why’s that?”

“Daddy,” she sighs. “You do get it, right? We like coming to your house to get away from Dad and Liam’s. We like having somewhere that’s calm, not five kids running around… we can go chill on the beach, we can paint and stuff?”

“It’s not fair to punish me ‘cos of that,” Zayn says, staring at the license plate of the car ahead of him, so hard he zones out. “What, ‘cos Louis beat me to movin’ on, I’m not allowed to have a life?”

“That’s not what I meant!”

“That’s what I’m hearing.”

“I just expected everything to stay the same for a while, for once. I feel like Amir probably did too. We keep having to get used to so much stuff, and then when we do, it all changes again.”

Zayn sighs, then reaches over to pat her on the arm. “I think this is the last big change for a while.”

They’re quiet for a moment.

“I am excited to meet them,” Mia says. “I promise. And I’m excited for you guys. I feel like you’re gonna be good dads together. I know how much Harry likes babies.”

“Thank you, love,” he says, relieved.

Mia looks over at him again. “We probably won’t be that close, though,” she says. “I’m eleven. When they’re eleven, I’ll be, um....”

“Twenty-two, twenty-three,” he helps her.

“I know! I know. But that’s what I’m saying, I’ll be graduated from college.”

“I know.”

“I just didn’t want you to be holding out for that or anything.”

“Not holding out for that, no. Being a good big sister is plenty.”

“Probably won’t be close with any of the others the way I am with Amir,” she murmurs. “And with Sunday, I guess.”

Zayn feels a stab of pain at that, that his daughter would be closer with Liam’s daughter than to her half-siblings, but he supposes that if he puts on his AA glasses and looks at it on a clinical level, it makes sense. Age and proximity usually decide these things. And Sunday’s only days older than Amir, he seems to recall. Just a fluke of timing.

She’s a sweet kid. Sort of a nice, polite little wallflower; serious in the way that Liam once was. She doesn’t say much in front of Zayn, or anyone else she doesn’t know well.

“Maybe when you’re older,” he says. “Once they’re grown, it won’t matter so much. Grown is grown.”

“Yeah,” Mia agrees. “Maybe.”

*

The kids let themselves in with the handprint scanner by the door (arguing as usual over whose handprint it should be, in that way they have of jockeying for place when it does not matter one iota) then chase each other inside with shouts of laughter.

“Wait,” Amir says, freezing as he steps into the foyer. “I smell popcorn?”

“Ooh, d’you think Liam’s making some?” Mia says.

They toss their bookbags down in unison and run pell-mell for the kitchen.

“Hey,” Zayn shouts after them, “don’t wreck your dinner!”

“We haven’t even had lunch!” Mia yells back. “Just crudites!”

“Don’t wreck your lunch, then!”

Louis comes traipsing down the stairs in a bathrobe over a t-shirt and sweats, hair mussed and standing on end in parts, rubbing at his eyes. “Woss all the shoutin’?” he says sleepily.

“Nothin’,” Zayn says. “Guess your husband’s made popcorn.”

“Oh,” Louis groans, stopping in front of him and nodding. “Yeah… he bought an old popcorn machine off a theater an’, like. What’s the word? Rebuilt it? Refurbished. Refurbished it. One of his little weekend projects.”

“Exciting.”

“Don’t be an arse,” Louis says, but he’s grinning. “So what’s up? You’ve got dad face.”

Zayn tries to slacken his facial muscles. “Dad face?”

“Yeah, like, I’m ‘ready t’ kill one of the kids’ face.”

“Well, we told them about, erm…” Zayn tries to communicate it with a hand gesture, then realizes he’s being ridiculously superstitious. “Y’know, Harry being pregnant.”

Louis nods.

“Yas took it alright, I guess, she’s just sort of resigned… but Amir was pretty upset. I think I managed to talk him through it a bit, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s sulky, acting out with you, these next couple days.”

“Oh,” Louis says, still sounding sort of sleepy. He rubs his hand over his face. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah, I mean.” Louis shrugs. “Harry’s gonna have your baby, right, God willing? Not like we had any way around that.”

“You just sound really chilled out.”

Louis smiles without it reaching his eyes. “I’m in a lot of pain today,” he says. “On some pain meds and muscle relaxers.”

Zayn takes stock of him for the first time; he looks like he might not have been out of his pajamas yet today, and his eyes are puffy like was crying earlier. “You alright, or?”

“Better now,” Louis says lightly.

“I mean in general… seems like you’ve been in pain all the time lately.”

“I have been,” he chirps. “I’m just fucked up. Back, pelvis.”

“Sorry.”

“Nothing for you to be sorry about.”

“This all started after you had Amir.”

He shrugs.

Zayn looks him up and down helplessly. “You want a hug, mate?”

Louis laughs; it sounds hoarse. Zayn wonders if he’s been smoking weed, too. “All about the hugs lately, aren’t you?”

“Well, I’ve been in a better mood…”

Zayn pulls him in, holding him close. Louis reaches up and wraps his arms around Zayn’s neck, clinging to him the way he used to do. Zayn slips his hands up the small of Louis’ back and leaves them pressed between his shoulder blades.

“Part of why Amir’s angry has nothing to do with you,” Louis murmurs. “It’s about me. He’s still upset he’s getting less attention since the twins came. I think he thought things around here would get back to normal faster than they have done.”

“Right. He did mention that.”

“So, there you are.”

“And where are these twins of yours?”

“Napping,” Louis says.

“They still nap?”

“They’re only two, mate.”

“Right, yeah… So, question.”

“Uh-huh?”

“How hard is it?” Zayn whispers in his ear. “Two babies plus our kids?”

Louis laughs softly, his breath tickling Zayn’s neck. “You’re in for it, love. You’ve got no idea.”

“Great.”

They both laugh some more. Zayn likes the feel of Louis’ warm, fine-boned body in his arms, and doesn’t quite want to let him go yet. Louis doesn’t seem like he’s in a hurry to be let go of, either. He fists the edge of Zayn’s t-shirt sleeve in his hand, and Zayn reaches up to caress the back of his head.

Footsteps come hurrying back down the hall, and before they can separate, Mia appears. She looks at them in surprise, and Zayn clears his throat, letting Louis go. Just in time, too. He was about to get proper stupid and kiss Louis on the neck, which is not the sort of thing he needs to be doing in potential view of their angry and confused children.

Louis turns and sees her. “What’s up?” he says, a little too breezily.

“Nothing,” she says. “I just wanted to say bye to Dad.”

Zayn opens his arms, and she grins at him, then runs toward him and jumps into them like she used to do. He lets out a soft groan, swinging her around, then sets her down and kisses her on the head. “Bye, love.”

Mia pulls back from him. “Amir said to tell you bye,” she says.

Zayn inhales. “What, he doesn’t want to come say it himself?”

He looks up at Louis, who gives him a tight-lipped expression of regret.

“Fine, I’ll go to him,” Zayn says, stroking Mia’s hair briefly before striding off down the hall. He isn’t a parenting theory expert, or anything — he never read as many books on it as Louis did — but he thinks right now he needs to forcibly remind Amir that he’s there for him, even as Amir tries to push him away.

Zayn finds his son in the kitchen, slumped over the kitchen island as he idly scrolls through his phone. Liam is leaning on a counter keeping watch as a candy-red popcorn machine pops kernels like rapid machine gun fire.

Liam catches his eye and waves hello. Zayn chin nods back, then comes around to Amir and lays a hand on his back. Amir twitches in surprise and tears his gaze from his phone, looking up at him.

“Hullo,” Zayn says. “I’m leaving.”

“Okay,” Amir says, shrugging.

“You don’t want to say bye to me? You always say bye to me.”

“Bye, then,” Amir says.

Liam is looking determinedly up at the high ceiling as if there’s something very interesting on it.

Zayn strokes Amir’s hair back from his face and nods at him. “Alright. Bye.”

He moves as if to go, which is when Amir grabs for him. “Wait…”

Zayn pauses, and Amir drags him into a tight hug. Zayn wraps an arm around his son and cradles him close.

“I’ll see you next week,” Zayn says quietly. “Alright?”

“Okay,” Amir mumbles. He hangs on a moment longer, then pulls away and goes back to staring at his phone.

Heartened, Zayn ruffles his hair. Liam gives him a thumbs-up from the corner and mouths _keep at it_. Zayn wants to be annoyed by this, wants to tell Liam to mind his own damn business, but Louis recently mentioned Liam’s having his own problems connecting with Sunday lately, so it probably really is just innocent solidarity. He gives Liam a manful smile.

When he comes back into the foyer, Louis is sat on the bottom step, and Mia is sitting behind him digging her elbow into his trap muscles.

“She’s my new masseuse,” Louis explains with a twinkle in his eye.

Zayn laughs. “If you’re that hard up for cash, mate, you should’ve said something.”

“She’s actually not bad at it,” Louis says. “Got those sharp little elbows to break up knots with.”

Mia nods, looking very serious. “I practice on Sunday,” she says. “She gets muscle pains from doing horse stuff.”

“Poor kid,” Louis says. “Mims is probably knockin’ her black and blue.”

“I am not! I’m gentle!”

Louis reaches up and pats her on the arm.

“So, I’m gonna go,” Zayn says, jingling his keys in his hand.

“Alright,” Louis says. “Tell Harold we said hi. Is he feeling alright? He told us he was, but he likes to hedge.”

“Yeah, he’s great,” Zayn says. “Just sort of hangs about the house doin’ Pilates all day, drinking seaweed drinks, whatever he does. Avoiding all toxins.”

“Oh, yes, the toxins,” Louis says with a smile. “Liam was big on that when I was pregnant. Barely wanted me to ride in the car or eat a tomato.”

Mia makes a petulant face. “So, can we still do the mural we were gonna do in the hallway? Or do we have to wait ‘til the baby comes?”

“We’ll have to hold off for a while, sorry,” Zayn says apologetically. “Harry can’t stand the paint fumes… babies probably shouldn’t be breathing them, either. But we can keep painting in the painting room on weekends.”

“Okay,” she says glumly.

“Gives us longer to plan what we want the mural to be,” Zayn says.

“Underwater,” Mia says. “Me and Amir agreed on that. Like a coral reef or something.”

“Brilliant,” Zayn says. “Fine by me.” He waves at them both, then, and they both blow him a kiss. “Bye.”

“Bye Dad!”

“Feel better, Louis,” Zayn adds.

“Trying,” Louis calls after him as he heads for the door.

*

Louis eventually gets too groggy and achy to be awake or take care of children, and warns Liam, who’s sat on the floor of the nursery trying to calm the boisterously post-nap twins. “I’m gonna go lie down,” he says from the doorway. “Sorry to bail on you, but…”

“It’s alright,” Liam assures him, though he looks harried. “Have you, um, have you got a chance to look at those nanny resumes yet?”

“Erm. A couple. Didn’t see anyone I was in love with.”

“Oh, well, we’ll keep looking,” Liam says cheerfully, as he snatches a tiny toy firetruck out of Max’s hand before he can shove it in his mouth.

Louis slips out of the room. He only feels a little bit guilty; Liam’s been working a lot and spotty on the dad front all this past week, so he can go ahead and step up for a few hours.

He climbs into bed and dozes in and out of wakefulness for a while, having strange dreams and only marking time by the light changing. He hears, from time to time, boisterous noises from the kids downstairs, but Liam quickly quiets them down.

Some time later, he’s awoken by Mia and Sunday whispering in his doorway. He keeps his eyes shut, listening in amusement as they creep over to him.

“Dad,” Mia whispers, and shoves at his arm. “Dad. You alive?”

“No,” Louis grumbles. “I’m dead. What d’you want?”

Hands reach out to place a cool washcloth on his forehead.

“Thanks,” he says more gently.

“Sure,” Sunday says.

“Fanks,” Mia imitates him, making Sunday laugh.

He feels them clamber up onto the bed, and cracks one eye open suspiciously. They’re sitting on either side of him, criss cross applesauce.

“Da-ad,” Mia sings to him, “could I sleep over at Zoe’s tonight?”

“No,” Louis says, squinting at her and sitting up against his pillows. “You lost your mind? It’s a school night.”

“So?”

“So, that’s against my policy. Plus, your grades are shit so far this quarter. You’re not going anywhere.”

Mia pouts at him. “Fine, but can I hang out with her?”

Louis suspects she never actually wanted to sleep over — this was just her taking an initially strong negotiating stance so he’d accept this second, lower ask. “Is your homework done?”

Sunday glances over at Mia, chewing at her bottom lip.

“Yes,” she says.

“Did you bully your brother into doing it for you?”

Mia gets darty-eyed when she’s lying, just like Zayn. “No.”

“Bullshit,” Louis says. “Do it over. At least the maths. I know you can do the other stuff, and I know they give you too much, but you’ve got to pass maths to get anywhere in life. ‘S’like, half that SAT test, innit?”

“It’s a third,” Sunday says. “I think they changed it back.”

“Shit,” Louis says. “Impressed you know that.”

“They started preparing us for it in fourth grade,” Mia says.

This sounds entirely too early to Louis, but he supposes that’s what you get when you send your kids off to fancy prep schools.

“Well, tell them to stop changing it,” he says.

“I’ll tell them tomorrow,” Sunday deadpans, making him laugh.

“So is that a yes to Zoe?” Mia says.

Louis sighs at her. “If you get your math redone, yeah, fine.”

“Thaaank you.”

“You’re weeelcome. Is that all you two came to bother me about?”

Sunday and Mia exchange a look and shrug.

“No,” Mia says. “We were kind of worried about you.”

“Worried? About me? I’m fine.” Louis tries to sit up a little more to indicate this, but he tweaks something in his low back and rolls over onto his side, hissing in queasy pain.

“Dad,” Mia says, a bit pleading.

“I _am_ fine,” Louis mumbles into the down comforter. “Just me steroid injections wore off, is all. I’ve got a doctor’s appointment Monday. Where’s Amir?”

“He went to go hang out with Jason and Evan,” Mia says.

“What? I didn’t approve that.”

“Liam said you did,” she says. “He said he poked his head in here and asked you, and you said yeah.”

“Shit…” Louis pulls his phone out of his pocket and squints blearily at it, firing off a text to Liam: _DONT ASK ME QUESTIONS WHEN IM ASLEEP AND ON DRUGS PAYNO xx_

“Do you want us to go?” Sunday says.

“No, no,” he says. “I like the company. Put the TV on, if you like.”

“Put soccer on,” Mia says to Sunday.

“No, soccer’s boring,” Sunday says, but quickly adds: “No offense to you guys.”

“Much taken,” Louis says. “Also, quit calling it soccer.”

He shuts his eyes again, but he hears the set switch on, and the jumbled noise of interrupted sound bites as someone flips through the channels. He fumbles around on the bed for the damp washcloth, because it was actually helping a little, and puts it back against his forehead.

They settle on one channel, but the voices sound eerily familiar. Kardashians.

“Please no,” Louis begs.

“Sorry,” Mia says, laughing. “Majority rule.”

“You don’t even like them, love!”

“I know, but I think they’re funny.”

“They make me feel like our family is actually really normal,” Sunday says.

“Our family _is_ normal,” Louis insists, pulling a pillow over his head to drown out the vocal fry coming from the television.

“More normal than theirs,” Mia agrees. “Not more normal than most people’s. Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“How do you feel about baba having more kids?”

“Ahh,” Louis sighs and sets the pillow back down, stuffing it under his head so he can look at her. “I’m happy for him. It’s something they wanted.”

Mia has her legs pulled to her chest, her chin resting on them. “It doesn’t feel weird, or anything?”

“No, not weird at all,” Louis lies. He pauses, then says, “Do you feel weird about it?”

Sunday glances over at Mia, then looks down at the bedspread as if to give them privacy. Mia fidgets a little.

“I guess I, like, a little bit feel the same way Amir did,” she says. “Just, like, I didn’t think it was gonna be so soon.”

“Is that what he said?”

“No,” Mia says, and snorts. “He said, this is bullshit, why can’t everyone stop having babies? And then he ran out of the room.”

Louis lets his breath out in a wearied sigh. “Right.”

“But I know what Amir thinks about stuff,” Mia says, and she ducks her gaze then, too, fiddling with a friendship bracelet on her wrist that her pal Tasha gave her. “I know he just feels like it’s too soon. And he feels like he’s losing Dad.”

“Oh, but he’s not,” Louis says softly. “He’s not…”

“I know.”

“You didn’t feel like you were losing me when I got pregnant wiv the twins, did you? Either of you?”

Mia and Sunday glance at each other.

“I mean, we didn’t expect you to be mad and upset and tired all the time for, like, a year and a half,” Mia says, and Sunday nods.

Louis laughs. “Oh, great.”

“But it’s kinda different with Dad,” Mia adds. “Y’know? He like, goes away inside himself. Like this summer.”

“Okay, I’m gonna go,” Sunday whispers, nimbly sliding backwards off the bed.

“Wait, you don’t have to,” Mia says.

“No, I’m gonna go downstairs,” she says, slipping toward the door. “Um, feel better, D — Louis.”

Louis’ heart swells and quickens in his chest. Was she about to slip and call him _Dad_? It probably doesn’t mean anything, probably a bit like calling your teacher Mum, but it makes him feel good all the same.

“Thanks, sweets,” he says.

As soon as the door shuts behind her, tears well in Mia’s eyes.

“No, no,” Louis says, sitting up a bit with a groan. “No, no crying. C’mere. What’s wrong?”

“I’m not crying.” She comes to him, though, and lets him hug her. “I just worry about Dad.”

“I know.” Louis strokes her hair. “But that isn’t your job.”

“I do, though,” Mia says, pulling back. “And I worry about you.”

“Not your job either.”

More tears appear. “Sorry I didn’t do my stupid homework.”

“Sweetheart,” Louis says, laughing. “D’you think, like, me back hurts ‘cos you don’t do your work and you mouth off to me? No.”

Mia shakes her head. “Can I tell you something?”

This strikes electric fear into his parental heart, but he says, “Yeah.”

“My friend Sammy’s dad… I mean, she’s not really my _friend_ friend, but she sort of is… she was at my birthday? Anyway, um.” Mia drags in a deep breath. “Her dad did something bad. Like, with his company. And he was going to have to go to jail for a really long time. Tasha told me all about it, ‘cos she knows Sammy better, but like, he was acting weird, and he was always asleep when Tasha went over there to hang out. And then he, um.”

She looks down again, her mouth set stubbornly.

“He what,” Louis prods her.

“He killed himself,” she says. “At their house. Their housekeeper found him.”

“Oh my God,” Louis says. This cuts through his sleepy Flexeril haze, and he sits up even more, despite the protest from his spine. “Oh, sweetheart. When’d this happen?”

“In October,” Mia says quietly.

“Why didn’t I hear about it?”

“I dunno,” she says. “I think you’ve just been, like… not paying attention to that kind of stuff, ‘cos you guys are busy with the babies. And you aren’t really friends with the other parents.”

This is true, unfortunately. He and Liam are superficially friendly with them, but they don’t have many parent friends who aren’t fellow industry types. “But why didn’t you say something?”

She shrugs. “I didn’t think that much about it. But Sammy, like, just came back to school last week, and she’s been so quiet, and it freaks me out. And no one’s talking to her. Like, no one. Nobody knows what to say, I guess?”

“That’s horrible,” Louis says. “You should talk to her, love. Let her know you’re still her friend.”

Mia lets out a tearful, huffing laugh. “I’m scared.”

“Of what?”

“That, like, if I talk to her…”

“That what?”

“That something bad’s going to happen to my dads, too,” she chokes out.

“Honey. No. That isn’t how things work. That’s just your anxiety, okay?”

She returns to his arms, burying her face in his chest. Louis squeezes her tight.

“I’m not going anywhere for a long time,” Louis says. “Not if I can help it. Neither is Zayn.”

“What if it doesn’t work out with Harry, either?” Mia says, her voice muffled. “What if it’s the same thing like what happened with you guys, and they get a divorce, and Dad is sick and sad and alone again?”

“I don’t think that’ll happen.”

“But you can’t promise me it won’t.”

“Mims,” Louis says patiently, “even if they split up, your dad’s in a good place now, alright? He’d be alright. He’s not going anywhere, not on purpose. Please don’t worry about shit like that.”

“I don’t, but he was lonely before Harry… he dated all those assholes...”

Louis sighs. “You’ve grown up too fast, you know.”

Mia shrugs.

“Sweets, he had you and Amir. And his career, and his family back home.”

“I just worry about him.”

“I think him and Harry are solid, alright? Nothin’ in life is guaranteed, but I don’t think you have to worry. And even if you did, worryin’ wouldn’t stop it from happening. You’re too young to have all this on your mind.”

“What about you?” she says pitifully into his shirt.

“The fuck about me?” Louis retorts, making her laugh. “C’mon. I’m taking naps ‘cos my medication makes me drowsy, love, not ‘cos I’ve given up on life.”

“But you’re so tired from the twins.”

Louis sighs. “I’ll hire a new nanny, I will. I’ve just been picky, I feel like no one’s good enough to trust with all five of you, just rather do it meself.”

“If you get a bad one and she’s an asshole when you’re not around, I’ll kick her,” Mia says. “I’ll kick her and then, like, hold her down and call the police.”

Louis tousles her hair. “That’s my girl. Look, why don’t you put some footie on, so we can distract you from all this shit?”

“But I have to do my homework,” she says, wiping at her eyes as she leans across the bed to grab the remote.

“You can put that off for a bit, I’ll allow it.”

Mia hands him the remote before settling against the pillows next to him. Louis slings an arm around her and pulls her into the crook of his arm, stroking her dark hair, flicking through channels with his other hand.

“Harry said he wants to bond with me,” she says quietly.

Louis’ hand stills briefly. “Yeah?”

“And Amir, I guess. He said since they have babies on the way, he wants to be closer with us.”

Louis wrangles a tiny lurch of irrational jealousy at hearing this, and tries to focus on being happy that Harry is being generous with his love.

“That’s good,” he says. “Good idea. Especially for Amir, since he’s so bent out of shape over this.”

“Yeah, I think Amir’s kind of pissed at Harry right now,” Mia says. “He didn’t even say bye to him when we left.”

“Oh, I don’t like that at all. That’s rude.”

“He’s just being a drama queen. He’s always like that.”

“Yeah,” Louis admits, remembering how after he’d told the kids they were going to move in with Liam and Sunday, Amir had snubbed Liam for an entire month, pretending he couldn’t hear anything he said. (Liam almost lost his mind from frustration toward the end of this.) He lands on a footie game, and sets the remote down on the bed. “Fathers and sons are a complicated thing, though.”

“You’re his father too,” Mia points out.

Louis keeps stroking her hair, tucking it behind her ear. “I gave birth to you lot, though. It is, honestly, a slightly different relationship.”

Mia shrugs, her little shoulder moving against Louis’ ribs. “I guess.”

“So, do you _want_ to bond with Harry?”

“Yeah, I do. I just wish he wasn’t trying so hard.”

“Be grateful that he is. Not everyone tries with their stepkids.”

“I guess.”

“I know you’re very loyal to me,” Louis says, “but Harry’s not trying to replace me or anythin’.”

“I don’t think he is!” Mia says. “Look, can I just decide for myself how I feel about stuff?”

Louis laughs. “I’m quite used to you insisting on that, don’t worry.”

“Mostly I just don’t even know what to bond with him over.”

“Acting! You like doing school plays, right? You are aware he’s a professional actor, yeah?”

“Ohh,” Mia says. “Duh. I always forget.”

“That’s alright. He’s a lot of things, it’s confusing.”

“D’you think he could help you help me get ready to audition for South Pacific?”

Louis laughs. “Sure. Drama teacher wants you to go out for the lead, you said?”

“Not the lead, but it’s a kinda big part. Liat. I think she just wants me ‘cos Liat is supposed to be a Vietnamese girl, but every other girl who does drama is like, super blonde with no eyebrows.”

“You’re not a half bad actress, either,” Louis prods her.

Mia shrugs again. “Everyone at my school wants to be an actress, or an influencer, or whatever,” she says. “They’re boring. I want to be a famous soccer player.”

“Football.”

“Soccer.”

Louis laughs and sighs. “Do whatever makes you happy, lovey.”

“Thanks!” she chirps. “I will.”

*

Sunday finds her dad and brothers outside, playing with a half dozen of the inflatable beach balls from the pool and two of Mia’s little collapsible soccer nets. It looks like the game is to kick a ball into one of the goals, but it seems to mostly involve the boys falling over and laughing hysterically about falling over, then Liam picking them up and swinging them around.

Max points at her as she heads down the hill and announces, “Sundaaay!” to no one in particular.

“SUNDAY,” Patrick yells. “Hi!”

She laughs. “Hi.”

Liam shades his hand with his eyes and smiles at her. “Hey sweetheart,” he calls. “What’s up?”

“Nothing,” she says. “Just came to say hi.”

“Well, hullo! We’re just, um.” Liam laughs and shrugs. “Not sure what we’re doing. I’ve been trying to teach them the basics of football, ‘cos I want to surprise Louis for his birthday, but we’re, er, not quite there yet. Maybe for next year.”

“You should get Mia’s help,” Sunday suggests.

“I was thinking that, but, y’know, God bless her, she’s not the best secret keeper,” Liam says. “So is she with Louis, or have I lost track of another child?”

“She’s with him,” Sunday says, and she comes over to sit down in the grass beside a net, squinting as the bright California sun slants through the tall trees at her. “They were talking about Harry and the baby and stuff.”

“Right, right.”

Max, who was wrestling with Patrick, wriggles away from him to come present Sunday with a dandelion that he has clenched in his chubby toddler fist.

“Thanks, Maxy,” she says, taking it.

“You’re weltum,” he chirps politely.

Liam rolls a beach ball to Patrick, who kicks at it. It bounces into one of the nets.

“Ayyyyy!” Liam cheers at him, and scoops Paddy up under the armpits, hoisting him into the air. “There’s my boy! That’s our Beckham in training.”

Patrick is laughing when Liam sets him back down, clearly having only the most minimal understanding of what he did but happy to be praised.

“Y’know, loves,” Liam says to her, “if you ever… um… If you ever want to have a chat with me about that sort of thing, I’m here.”

“What sort of thing?”

“Oh, I dunno. Me getting remarried, or your mum being engaged to John… how you feel about all of it.”

Sunday shrugs. “I like our new family,” she says. “And John is nice.”

“Right,” Liam says, nodding. “So — all good, then?”

“I guess.” She hesitates, then says, “I just thought I’d actually start seeing Mum more, after she said she wanted that...”

Liam exhales. “Yeah. I know, love. But you know it’s got nothing at all to do with you, right?”

“I know, but it feels like it,” she mutters. “She’s my mom.”

“I know,” Liam says, sounding pained. “I know, I do.”

Max, who’s sitting beside Sunday ripping up grass, looks up at her. “You don’t have a _mom_ ,” he says with a goofy grin, like she’s trying to play a joke on him. Peekaboo.

“Yeah I do,” Sunday says, her throat tight. “You just haven’t met her.”

(Ceci has refused all opportunities to meet the twins. She actually did briefly see Max when they were newborns; she came to pick Sunday up one weekend, and Louis came to the door with a colicky baby in his arms. This didn’t go over well with Ceci at all.)

“No you don’t,” Patrick says, then stops and looks confused. “What’s a mom?”

“You know what a mom is,” Liam says. “It’s like a dad, but a girl. You know how Sunday’s a girl? Mums are girls.”

Max narrows his mismatched eyes. “No they’re not,” he says.

“No?” Liam comes over to him, fashioning his hand into a claw and tickling Max with it. Max squeals. “No? You’re gonna tell me no, huh?” he teases.

“No, no, no, no,” Max says happily, giggling.

Sunday feels sad, watching them, but maybe she’s just sad because it’s getting late in the afternoon she has school tomorrow. She always gets blue around this time on Sundays, which everyone finds terribly ironic. Sunday has the Sunday blues! But she does. Sundays are a sad day. She knows she’s named after a play, _Sunday in the Park with George,_ but if she had to pick she’d rather be named George. Like the cool tomboy friend in those Nancy Drew games she plays on her tablet.

Her mom named her. Her mom loves to tell her this, like it makes up for everything. She created Sunday, she named her. So how come she keeps leaving? How come she’s not around, like she keeps saying she wants to be?

Sunday doesn’t like to say things like that to her dad, because they just make him sad. She knows he’s sad she doesn’t really have her mom, or a regular life with two together parents like he did. He feels like it’s his fault. But she has him, and her siblings, whether or not they’re step or half or whatever.

“Who did you guys think my parents were, if I didn’t have a mom?” Sunday says to Patrick, who’s toddled over to her and sat beside her in the grass, undoing and redoing the Velcro on his shoes with a loud _sshhhhk_.

Patrick looks up at her curiously with his dark eyes that resemble her own. “Mine,” he says, with that unshakeable confidence he has.

“Yours? You think we have the same parents?”

He nods.

Liam, who’s sat down himself and is being crowned with loose blades of grass by Max, shrugs. “They’re so little, they don’t understand things like that at all,” he whispers.

“I know.”

“I think they just barely understand that Mims and Amir leave to be with Zayn… but, y’know, you’re here with them the whole week.”

Right. She doesn’t really have another parent, not like Mia and Amir do. At best, her mom is like a fun aunt, someone who wants to take her to cool places and buy her clothes. Not someone who wants to be there to wipe her tears and bring her to school in the morning.

Sunday always thought she had a mom. She convinced herself she did, for the longest time, despite all the evidence to the contrary. It got undeniable when the twins were born, and Ceci, after the huge fuss she’d made about wanting to be in Sunday’s life, started bailing on her again. Little things piled up: she’d say she was coming to a horse show, and then she wouldn’t be able to make it because of a work thing. Or she’d promise to take Sunday on a mother daughter trip, just the two of them, and Sunday would end up spending a weekend surrounded by her mother’s friends, while her stepdad stared at his phone in the corner. It took almost two years to get wise, but then the penny dropped. Her mom doesn’t really want to put the time in. She wants the rewards without the work. She thinks that because Sunday is her daughter, she should believe her when she lies, and fly to her side at the drop of a hat, and always give her mom faith and loyalty, never badmouthing her.

Well, Sunday doesn’t badmouth her. It would hurt too much to admit out loud how badly her mother has disappointed her and let her down. She keeps it stuffed away.

And Ceci badmouths Liam to her, so how is that fair? Liam almost never talks about Ceci, ever, which Sunday finds upsetting enough, but Ceci’s attitude toward all of it is even worse. She was sulky for months after the twins were born, asking Sunday all kinds of questions that she could tell were inappropriate: “Does it seem like Louis and Liam are still in love?” “Have they been fighting more or less?” “Has your dad mentioned me lately?” “How happy does he seem?”

Sunday would never admit it to Ceci, but she feels more secure with Louis. She was unsure of that at first, didn’t want to trust it, but she’s felt a little more safe ever since he married her dad.

Louis sort of forced her to trust him. He’s such a constant presence — always there, always checking up on her, always asking her how her day was, looking genuinely happy to see her every time he does. He doesn’t cook all the time like her dad does, but once in a while he cuts up some pineapple or watermelon and brings it to her in her room. He now comes with Liam to her horse shows — only sometimes, but if he says he’s going to be there, he’s there. He doesn’t tell her things unless they’re true.

And he takes care of her when she’s sick. She gets colds a lot; her pediatrician says she has a fragile immune system. If Liam’s home, he’ll sit with her and read to her until she falls asleep, but when he has to go to work, Louis will barrel in all cheerful and let her watch bad TV with him, joking around to cheer her up. Sometimes they’ll both keep her company, if the twins are asleep and nothing else needs to be done. They like to sing her name to the tune of _Monday, Monday_ while she’s falling asleep.

Sunday loves her mom so much, but it hurts to love her, like sticking your hand in a bucket of ice water. She knows it’s traitorous and bad, but she wishes she was Louis’ real daughter, sometimes. Everything would be simpler, and she could love him without feeling guilty for it, without feeling like she’s betraying Ceci. And maybe if she didn’t have a mom who left, she wouldn’t walk around with her thoughts and feelings in a jumble, always kind of wishing that she could disappear. Wishing she could get on her horse and gallop and gallop toward the horizon until she vanishes into the sky.

Max comes over to join Patrick and flops down in front of her. Sunday reaches up to pet his light hair. It’s soft, like Bo’s coat is.

Patrick babbles something that she doesn’t understand. She can only understand the twins half the time, though they always seem to understand each other.

Liam is discreetly holding up his phone to take a photo of them. Sunday notices, but she doesn’t mind; he never posts them anywhere. He just has a folder on his phone for photos of them, to look at when he has to fly to Antwerp or whatever.

He looks down at what he took, smiling. “I’ve got the cutest kids in the world,” he sings.

“The cutest daughter,” Sunday allows.

Liam laughs. “The cutest daughter in the world, and a pair of alright sons.”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

Liam laughs some more, his eyes twinkling.

*

When he gets home, Zayn finds Harry out on the marble patio by the pool, reading in a lounge chair.

It’s not quite warm out again — cold for L.A., somewhere in the sixties, and though it stopped raining, the sky is still in turmoil. Navy heaviness hangs like bruised fruit to the west, and the clouds over the ocean are thick like gray cotton. Harry’s got a long-sleeved black henley on over his shorts, and slippers on his feet.

He looks up when he hears Zayn’s footsteps, smiling wide at him. Zayn loves that Harry still smiles like that every time he sees him.

He comes over and perches next to him on the lounge, zipping up his jacket against the ocean chill and taking his vape out of his pocket. The wind is making tiny waves on the surface of their infinity pool. It makes Zayn want to take his sailboat out. He hasn’t in a few months now; he hasn’t felt up to it, hasn’t wanted to leave Harry behind on the shore.

Harry starts rubbing his back as he sits there, petting him through the leather. “My bony boy,” he says woefully.

Zayn exhales a cloud of butterscotch-flavored vapor. “I’m bony?”

“Yeah… I can feel your spine…”

“‘S’posed to be able to feel my spine.”

“Not this much.”

Zayn drags in another lungful of nicotine, then settles back next to Harry. Harry curls up against him, resting his forehead on Zayn’s shoulder.

“I’ve been to the doctor,” he says huskily. “Got my meds upped.”

Harry presses a kiss to his bicep. “I don’t think you need more antidepressants,” he says. “I think you just need to be a little kinder to yourself.”

This makes Zayn’s chest ache for some reason. “Maybe.”

“I’m sorry your kids were upset.”

“Yeah, I expected it, though.” Zayn’s quiet, looking past the infinity pool out at the ocean. “Yas said something in the car... She said they’ve got used to the idea of Louis’ place being chaotic. She said they like to come here and get away from all that.”

“It is peaceful here,” Harry says, intertwining their hands. “You make things peaceful for them, I think.”

“And now I’ve wrecked that,” Zayn says with regret.

“No, no. It’ll just be a bit different.”

“Our kids might be loud and difficult and messy… might have a boyish boy, like you said…”

Harry laughs. “We’ll live,” he says, bringing their clasped hands to his middle and pressing Zayn’s palm to him. “I can’t bring myself to be anything but happy, sorry.”

“No, don’t be,” Zayn says, rubbing him. “This is my problem, not yours.”

“It’s mine too,” Harry says. “Remember what we talked about.”

“I know,” Zayn says. “No, I don’t mean like you’re not their stepdad. I just mean it’s not on you to worry about.”

Harry lets out a groan that turns into a growl. “Let me in,” he says, jabbing Zayn in the ribs, making him laugh. “Let me in! Let me in!”

“You’re in!” Zayn exclaims, swatting his hands away. “Stop, I’m ticklish, stop it.”

Harry climbs atop him and starts tickling him in earnest, then. He slides down against the chaise in an attempt to escape, dropping his vape on the pool deck below. They wrestle for two minutes or so before getting tired and collapsing on each other, laughing.

Harry sits up after a moment and looks Zayn in the face, wrapping his hands around his wrists. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says, almost pleading. “After everything I put you through this year, you think a little bit of drama’s an imposition on me?”

Zayn shrugs. “This blended family stuff’s just a challenge,” he mumbles.

“I like a challenge,” Harry says. “Don’t you dare push me away, I know where you live.”

Zayn starts laughing again, and Harry leans in to kiss him.

“What d’you want to do tonight?” Harry murmurs against his mouth. “Dinner and a movie?”

Zayn nuzzles him. “Nah, there’s been no good movies lately… let’s just keep watching that show we were watchin’, those people stranded in the Arctic.”

“Nooo, I don’t want to, it’s so depressing. Let’s watch an old movie… let’s watch _Notting Hill._ ”

“See, now why d’you even ask me when you already know what you actually want to watch?”

“I want you to feel included in the decision-making,” Harry says.

“Cheers,” Zayn says, laughing.

Harry runs his fingers through Zayn’s hair, stroking his scalp. “I’m gonna feed you tonight, too,” he says. “I’ll cook. No chef, I promise, just me… and you just sit and don’t do anything. No fussing over me, none of that.”

“Alright,” Zayn agrees. “Hey, ah… Harry.”

“Yeah?”

“You can pay me stupid back taxes, if you really want.”

Harry’s eyes search his face. “You sure?”

“Yeah.”

He smiles his beautiful smile. “Brill. Consider it done.”

“Okay.”

Zayn closes his eyes and exhales, just letting himself exist in the moment — Harry’s careful hands touching him and the cool ocean breeze on his face.


	4. amir and evan part i

MANHATTAN, FEBRUARY 8, 2037

Student health is crowded, because it’s February, and all the sick idiots who forgot to get their flu shot have dragged their sorry selves over here. Probably none of them even wash their hands or sneeze into their elbows, either. It’s because of them that he’s sick, even though he _did_ get his flu shot.

Amir is in a surlier mood than usual. He’s not totally sure why, except that it’s the dead of winter in New York, and Evan’s been gone. He’s been up in the Catskills, interviewing for a summer counselor position at a therapeutic wilderness camp for troubled teens. He got past the first round, and the second interview isn’t for days, so he’s been at a hotel up there. Amir’s been so spoiled by his company these last few months that he doesn’t even remember how to sleep without him. He wriggles restlessly around in his sheets every night, missing Evan’s smell and his warm, solid body.

Evan’s been working at the Sierra Club in Manhattan part time — crashing with Amir half the time and his grandma the rest — but they warned him that with the summer influx of interns, his hours will probably get scaled way back come May. So he started looking for a summer gig.

Amir’s really proud of him. He’s doing something he actually cares about, something that matters, and paving the way to not have to take money from his parents anymore. Everyone else has been impressed with this too — even Zayn, who’s far from Evan’s biggest fan, said he’s been showing a lot of integrity.

Barely escaping the wildfire definitely changed him. It changed all of them. They have a group chat now, the four of them, and more often than not, they’re sending each other articles about climate change, morbidly funny memes about climate trauma, stories about natural disaster PTSD and habitat loss in California forests. They don’t usually say anything in response to each other’s texts, just silently react to them with a thumbs up or haha.

A nurse peeks out of the hall and calls his name; Amir gathers up his coat and follows her to a little room.

“Have a seat,” she says, without looking up from the tablet in her hand.

Amir sits on the bed with the crinkly paper instead of the chair, because he’s feeling melodramatic and wants to be treated like a patient. The nurse takes his vitals without saying anything. She’s chewing gum. He can smell it, it’s overpowering.

“What exactly’s the problem?” she finally says, looping her stethoscope back around her neck and cracking the gum. “Flu, you said?”

“I dunno,” Amir says. “I got the shot months ago. But I’ve been feeling sick for a couple weeks.”

She writes this down. “Weeks? How many weeks?”

“Like three or four, I guess.”

“And you haven’t seen any improvement?”

“Nah.”

“Have your symptoms gotten progressively worse?”

“No. It’s just the same.”

“And what do you mean by sick?”

“Just crappy and tired, and I don’t have an appetite. I feel like maybe it’s actually mono, or something.”

“Any fever?”

“No.”

“Mmm,” the nurse says. “Okay. You mind if I check your lymph nodes?”

“Go ahead.”

She steps toward him and starts massaging his neck and under his jaw. She’s bending over slightly so her cleavage is right at eye level; he finds himself thinking that her cross necklace dangling down between her breasts would make a cool album cover.

“Do you smoke?” she says.

“Cigarettes? No.”

“Taking any prescriptions?”

“I’m on the pill.”

“Regular drug or alcohol use?”

“I drink, and I smoke weed sometimes.” He doesn’t mention abusing Adderall that he buys off his friends; everyone here does that, but he’s not going to be the one to admit to it. And he does coke sometimes, but not _regularly._

“Any history of chronic illness?”

“No,” Amir says.

She nods, and stops feeling his throat. “Are you an omega?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sexually active?”

“Yeah.”

“With another male, or an alpha female?”

“With my boyfriend, so yeah.”

“Okay. Use any birth control besides the pill?”

“Nah.”

She keeps tapping away at the tablet. Amir watches her, uneasy.

“The doctor will be in momentarily,” she says, flashing him a smile, then leaves him there.

Amir flicks his watch display onto his forearm and starts answering texts.

A few minutes have gone by before the nurse comes back in, worrying at her bottom lip with her teeth.

Amir looks up. “No doctor?”

“We’re just wondering,” the nurse says, “is there any chance you might be pregnant?”

He lets out a breathless, incredulous laugh, his pulse quickening. “No, I’m not.”

“You know for sure?”

“I mean…” Amir trails off, staring at her. “I don’t — I haven’t, like. I mean, I’m a guy, I don’t get a period or anything… I just, like.” He trails off. “Why are you asking?”

“Well, you said the symptoms have been consistent for weeks,” she says. “No worsening, no improvement? That’s pretty unusual for a virus, except for mono.”

“I know, I thought I might have mono.”

“Well, you don’t have a fever, or any swelling in your lymph nodes, so…”

“Sooo?” Amir replies, a little testily.

She smiles as if to placate him. “We just want to rule it out. Do you want to do a test?”

Well, fucking _yeah_ , now that they’ve planted the idea in his head. He’s not going to have peace of mind until he makes sure it isn’t true. Amir stands up fast, accidentally knocking his coat on the floor, then snatches it up. “Sure.”

She hands him a cup and escorts him to a bathroom. “I just need a urine sample up to the black line on the side there,” she says, before shutting the door behind him.

Even as he’s unzipping his fly and pissing, he’s thinking there’s no way. He doesn’t even know why they’re having him do this; maybe it’s just a liability thing, so they don’t prescribe him anything that you can’t have while you’re pregnant. You can’t even have aspirin, he remembers; when his dad was pregnant with the twins, he couldn’t have aspirin.

Amir opens the door and gives her back the cup, this time full of pee. She takes it with a “thank you” (lol gross) and walks away. He stands there, unsure of what to do. He doesn’t want to go back to the little room, so he just hovers in the hallway. He slips his beanie off; his head is starting to get hot.

People go by as he waits — another nurse, and a woman dressed like she’s a therapist, in a comfy cardigan with a badge clipped to her belt. Each of them smiles at Amir as they pass him, and he stares edgily back. Women are always smiling at him; he’s not in the mood to entertain it right now.

Like, he’s on the pill. This is exactly _why_ he’s on the pill, because he has a steady boyfriend who basically lives with him. Yeah, maybe sometimes he takes it at the wrong time, like remembers it after a night out when he gets home at four in the morning and knocks it back with the sour beer left on his bedside table. And maybe he skips a day sometimes by accident, but not often. Not all the time. And he always takes an extra one the next day. Mia told him that’s what you should do.

“Amir?” a woman’s voice says from behind him.

Amir wheels around. A doctor is standing there; she’s boxy with a serious and square-jawed face, but she smiles kindly at him.

“Hi there,” she says. “I’m Dr. Curtis. Want to come with me back to your room so we can chat?”

That sounds bad. But maybe he’s dehydrated, or something. The pee he handed over was kind of dark.

He follows her down the hall, his palms prickly with sweat and his breaths coming shallowly. There has to be something wrong with him besides being pregnant, come on. He can’t think of anything besides mono, though, and they said his lymph nodes were normal.

Maybe he has some rare, undiagnosable autoimmune disorder, and he’ll be shuffled around from doctor to doctor as he gets sicker. But he’ll be the hot kind of sick, just all skinny with dark circles and his hair as thick as ever, wearing a dainty oxygen cannula. Evan will consecrate his life to taking care of him and finding a cure, but he’ll die young and beautiful like Mozart, with an unfinished requiem of his own. Everyone will be absolutely hysterical at his funeral, which they’ll hold in a massive airy cathedral, and his casket will be so heaped with lilies you can’t even see it. All of the brilliant albums he released over the course of his illness will hit the top ten and stay there for 500 weeks.

“Have a seat,” Dr. Curtis invites him when they step back into his room. She sits on a rolly stool and scoots up next to him. “So.”

“So,” Amir repeats.

“It looks like you’re about ten weeks pregnant. Does that sound right to you?”

The bottom drops out of the earth. His ears start ringing, like tinnitus, and he stares at her without understanding. No, I’m not pregnant, I’m mysteriously ill. Like Mozart.

Amir’s mouth is suddenly dry, probably because it’s hanging open. His heart is like a hummingbird in his chest; he can almost feel the panic attack that’s coming on. It’s vibrating in him like the ring of a gong.

“No,” he says, “it doesn’t sound right, what the fuck are you talking about? Did you mix my pee up with someone else’s?”

She shakes her head. The smile is more grim this time. “We didn’t.”

“I’m on the pill. There’s no way.”

“It’s an extremely accurate test.”

“But not a hundred percent?

“If you want to be absolutely sure, an ultrasound could confirm it.”

“Yeah, I want you to be sure,” he snaps, but he feels sick. If she’s wrong, he’s going to sue the school for emotional suffering. “Go ahead.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah!”

“Okay, sit tight,” Dr. Curtis says. “If you could just lay back on the table for me?”

Amir obliges her while she goes over and fetches a Bluetooth hologram display from the counter, then a white wireless thing that’s kind of shaped like a Taser.

She sets the former on a little table between them, and holds the latter in her hand like a weapon. “Hike your shirt up for me?”

He has a hoodie on over a vintage Metallica shirt that Evan got him for Christmas. He pulls them both up, exposing his stomach.

She squeezes gel on the wand before pressing it to him, right under his belly button. Amir remembers this whole routine from seeing his dad go through it, once. He had called Louis to pick him up from school that day, because he was anxious about something and just didn’t feel like being there, and Louis had an ultrasound appointment, so he took him along. He can remember sitting in a chair in the corner, watching alien black and white images on the screen while Louis and the ultrasound lady talked calmly and joked about something, like it wasn’t absolutely bizarre that his dad had two people inside him.

A 3D image jumps to life from the hologram display. Fuzzy, staticky waveforms and nothing else.

“You don’t have to look, if you don’t want to,” she says. “I’ll explain to you whatever I find out.”

“I want to look.” _‘Cause I think you’re full of shit._

“Okay.”

“So are you like, a gynecologist?” Amir says to her.

“No, I’m a general practitioner, but I specialized in obstetrics back in med school. So I take over anytime we have a student test positive for a pregnancy.”

Amir doesn’t like being included in that cohort. The test was wrong, it must have been — he’s sure she’ll tell him so, in a second. “What if it’s your day off?”

She laughs. “Good question. I’m still on call on those days, so if I can, I come in.”

“That sucks.”

“Well, I like my job.”

“Really?”

“Really.” She moves the wand, then clicks her tongue and says, “Okay.”

Amir stares at her. “Okay what?”

Dr. Curtis reaches out and pokes her fingers through a paler circular spot on the hologram. “See that, right there?”

“I guess.”

“That’s a ten-week-old fetus. Well-placed, not ectopic —“

No way. No fucking way. Heart racing, he jerks away from her without even meaning to, yanking his sweatshirt back down. The picture vanishes, mercifully.

Dr. Curtis sets the wand on the table with a little _clunk_.

“Where?” he demands, gesturing at himself. “Where exactly is that? ‘Cos I don’t see anything here, do you? I see a flat stomach.”

“Everyone is built differently,” she says patiently. “Some people don’t show until well into the second trimester.”

His ears start ringing at the words _second trimester_. No, no no.

The doctor pats him on the arm. “Do you want to talk about your options?”

“I know my fucking options,” he says immediately. “I need an abortion.”

“Okay. I can recommend you a few clinics in the city that offer abortion care.”

“I can’t go to those. My parents are famous, I need something private.”

“There’s total confidentiality,” she assured him.

“Oh, _really_? Planned Parenthood’s gonna guarantee me some asshole in the waiting room doesn’t see me and leak it to TMZ? Really?”

Dr. Curtis tucks her lips into her mouth like she’s thinking. “Well, I’m not really sure what a good alternative would be…”

“Don’t worry about it,” Amir says, grabbing his coat. “I’ll figure it out.”

“Hold on a moment,” she says, looking concerned. “You seem pretty distressed, I’d really like to counsel you more about this.”

“I don’t need counseling. I need to go.”

“Amir —“

He books it the fuck out of there, bumping into the rolly stool and not stopping, hurrying down the hallway and out into the waiting room, out to where the elevators are. The gel she put on him is so sticky, it’s making his shirt cling to his stomach, and no matter how many times he tugs at it, it just sticks again.

*

Amir manages to put it out of his head for a while. He has an afternoon piano class, and it’s a critique session, so he can distract himself with mentally tearing apart his classmates’ playing and nervously overthinking his own performance.

It’s not until he’s walking back to his apartment that he remembers, because Evan texts him.

It’s just a picture, a view of the woods from a hiking trail, but Amir stops dead in the middle of the sidewalk, frigid wind whipping his cheeks, and stares at it until he feels sick.

Neither of his roommates are home, and the apartment is that desolate kind of midday quiet. He pulls the front door shut so hard that the sound echoes, and drops his backpack with a thud, just to occupy the silence. Then he turns the TV in his cramped bedroom on, putting on a random HBO channel that’s playing _Training Day,_ and hooks his phone to his Bluetooth speakers to blast Coltrane.

The drinking begins on a whim. Amir is lying in bed pathetically when he spots a bottle of Jagermeister from last weekend that’s still on his desk, stares at it for a while, then leans over to grab it. He drinks it like it’s water, in long pulls, trying to cocoon himself in the cacophony of sounds filling the apartment.

The warm nest of his bed is some comfort. The sheets still smell like Evan, enough to soothe him.

Amir lies there holding his comforter to his nose and mouth, dragging in breaths. He has to tell him, doesn’t he? Maybe not. Maybe he can just get the abortion real quick before Evan gets back, and never have to say anything about it to anyone. That doesn’t feel right, though. He isn’t tough and independent like that. And he likes to tell Evan everything.

He tries to call Mia, but it goes to voicemail. Right, she has soccer practice on Tuesdays. He stares pathetically at his watch screen, his vision blurring with tears, then before he can think better of it he taps back out to his list of contacts and hits _Dad L._

Louis takes forever to pick up. When he does, he sounds harried. “What is it?” he says. “I’m in a writing session.”

Amir crumbles inside, like a madeleine cookie in coffee. “Nothing,” he mutters, sniffling.

There’s a pause followed by shuffling noises like Louis is walking, and then he says in a much kinder tone, “What’s wrong, love?”

If anything, this is even worse. He starts openly crying.

“Amir,” Louis says, clearly nervous now. “What’s wrong? Is everything okay?”

“It’s fine,” he chokes out.

“What is it?”

Oh, he can’t tell him. This is so fucking awkward and awful, so embarrassing for no reason he can quite pin down. But he has to tell him, because he doesn’t know how to get an abortion without his dad’s help. He doesn’t know what discreet doctor to go to or even how their insurance works. He doesn’t even think he ever scanned his insurance card into his Apple Wallet. He never hurts himself or gets sick.

“I have to tell you something,” he says.

“Okay?” Louis says, with a soft sigh. “Out with it, then.”

Amir opens his mouth and lets it stay open for a moment, running his tongue along his teeth. Then with a hiccup he says, “I need to get an abortion?”

Dead silence for a moment before a very soft, “Oh.”

“I’m sorry,” he manages.

“Oh, love, it’s okay. Don’t be sorry. Are you sure? Did you go to the doctor?”

“Yeah, I just got back…”

“Right,” Louis murmurs, “you were saying you thought you had mono?”

Amir chokes out a laugh. “Yeah, guess not.”

“Oh, what a pisser. God.”

“I know,” he says, pained.

“How far along are you?”

“Ten weeks.”

“God,” Louis says again. “And you really had no idea?”

“No.” Amir fists his hand in a blanket.

“Amir,” Louis says quietly, “we’ve talked about this…”

“I just didn’t think it could happen! I thought I… I dunno. I’m still on the pill.”

“Nothing else?”

“What d’you mean, nothing else?”

“Condoms, I mean.”

“Ugh,” Amir exclaims, grossed out. “Shouldn’t the pill, like, I dunno, _work?”_

Louis clears his throat. “Did you take it correctly?”

“Yeah!” He pauses. “Okay, not perfectly, all the time, but come on, but does anyone actually do that? This is so fucking unfair.”

“Well, life’s unfair,” Louis says. “Goes for the dirty hits whenever it can. I’d hoped this wouldn’t happen, but, y’know…” He pauses. “Maybe it’s on me. I knew you were having Evan over most nights, I should’ve said something. I know how easy it is to, y’know… slip up.”

It’s stressing Amir out to hear him sound so disappointed and concerned. He wants so badly for this not to be a big deal, to be able to just take care of this and move on.

“It’s a temporary situation,” he says.

Louis is quiet again. “So, um… you’re absolutely sure, then? You do want an abortion?”

“Of course! Jesus!”

“I’m only making sure! Just, you’re allowed to sleep on it, if you like. You only just found out.”

“Dad, I can’t have a — I don’t _want_ to have a baby! I’m not even twenty yet, I’m in school, my life’s just starting!”

Louis exhales. “I know,” he says with difficulty, like he doesn’t want to be reminded of Amir’s age right now. “Have you talked with Evan yet?”

Amir curls up miserably. “No. He’s still upstate.”

“You ought to ring him.”

“Why?”

“‘Cos you’ll feel better once you do, trust me.”

Amir stares at his dresser, zoning out, his bleary eyes going unfocused. He knows he’ll feel better when he can see Evan and touch him, but just talking to him? No. About this? No. That’s going to suck.

“What if he dumps me,” he says aloud.

“Oh, he won’t,” Louis says immediately. “He loves you.”

“I’m getting rid of his baby.” He’s wallowing in melodrama, now. “I’m just throwing it away.”

“You’re not doing anything of the sort. Don’t talk like that. It just isn’t the right time, not for either of you, alright? It’s the right choice.”

Amir nods, then smooths his hair back. It grew back so quickly after he buzzed it, it always does that. Soon it’ll be floppy and in his eyes again. “You mad at me?”

“No,” Louis says. “Do I sound it?”

“No.”

“Could’ve torn you off a strip, but what’s the point, y’know? What’s done is done. I can’t make you feel any worse than I’m sure you’re already making yourself feel.”

Amir worries his lip with his teeth. “You disappointed in me, though?”

Louis lets out a rueful little laugh. “No, I’d have to be a pretty big hypocrite.”

“I didn’t beat teen pregnancy,” he jokes.

“It’s alright, love. They nicked you with a month left, that’s not quite fair.”

He cracks a smile for the first time all day. “No, I guess not.”

“I’m mostly worried about you, is all.”

“I’ll be fine,” Amir says, not wanting to be babied. “But can you, um… Can you tell me where to go? To get it? Like, I can’t just go to a clinic where anyone could see me…”

“Ohh, yeah yeah. No, ‘course you can’t. I’ll get you the name of a doctor and ring you back with the details, okay? I’m sorry, love, I’ve just really got to get back to this session. I can ring you as soon as I’m done.”

“It’s okay, it can wait. Are you gonna do the insurance, and pay for it and stuff?”

“Yeah, I’ll take care of that. Unless Evan wants to pay.”

“Why would he want to?”

“It’s just symbolic. He might.”

“I guess,” Amir says, confused. “Hey, listen, please don’t tell anybody, okay? Not even Liam… I know you tell him everything.”

“I won’t tell a soul unless you want me to.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

“Although, erm… if something were to happen, and I’m not saying there’s any chance it will, but if you had some sort of complication or anything, or medical emergency, I’d have to tell Zayn what was goin’ on,” Louis says apologetically. “I can’t keep that sort of thing from him.”

Amir has a sting of anxiety. “I guess, but that’s not gonna happen.”

“I know it won’t. Just wanted to say.”

“Okay. Um… I’m gonna go.”

“You sure you’re alright?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Alright. Call if you need me,” Louis says.

“I will.”

*

When Greg gets home from class, Amir turns the music off and goes out in the living room with him so they can play video games and bitch about their classes. Greg’s up getting a Dr. Pepper when Amir gets a text from Evan.

_So do you have mono or nah_

Amir stares at his watch. He doesn’t want to leave him on read, but he can’t talk about this over text.

 _No mono_ , he says. _Can I call you later?_

 _Call me_? Evan says. _yea sure… what’s up??_

_when are you free?_

_i’m free rn if you want to talk. i’m just hiking with the camp director_

_still?_

_Lol yeah it’s like a five hour hike. But we actually just stopped for water, if you want to call_

_no it’s fine. Call me when you get back to your room or your car or w/e_

Evan types, then stops, then types some more. _everything okay??_

_Yeah._

*

Jordan gets home from class, and he and Greg immediately start arguing about where they’re all going tonight and who they should go out with and who’s picking up the alcohol for them this time. They keep trying to rope Amir in, but he knows there’s no way he’s partying tonight.

“I have homework,” he finally says.

Both his roommates look at him funny.

“Come on, Amir,” Greg says. “Just get it done now.”

“Nah,” he says, getting up. “I’m gonna nap now. You guys go.”

“You’re not even gonna pregame with us?” Jordan says. “We’re gonna try kratom.”

“I have to write a paper about Fats Domino.”

“You write all your papers high,” Greg argues.

“Dude,” Amir says. “I’m not going. Forget it.”

Jordan squints at him. “Are you sick or something?”

“Maybe,” Amir says, relieved for the alibi. “I dunno. I feel weird.”

“That sucks,” Greg says sympathetically. “Feel better, alright?”

Jordan nods, and they both wave to him as he heads off down the hall before they resume bickering.

*

Evan calls him after he’s been lying there for about an hour, dozing. He’s much more aware of his symptoms than he was before. Now that it has an explanation, it’s painfully obvious: the exhaustion, the queasy discomfort, the general crappy feeling.

“Hey,” Amir says when he picks up.

“Hey, I’m back at my hotel. What’s up?”

Amir fiddles with the edge of a blanket, feeling hurt and anxiety well up in his chest like the tide. “I just found out I’m pregnant,” he says, while he still has inertia on his side.

It’s not as hard as telling his dad. The words come out more easily.

All of Evan’s breath seems to leave him in an exhale. “Sorry, you’re what?”

“I’m pregnant, Evan.”

“Ohh, shit. Shit. Wow.”

Amir doesn’t have anything to say to that.

“You’re sure?” Evan adds.

“Yeah. They tested me at student health.”

“So… not mono.”

“No, not mono,” Amir says, annoyed. “I’m like… ten weeks pregnant.”

“ _Ten_? Holy shit, _ten_?”

“Can you relax?”

“But that’s so long! What is that, like —”

“Two and a half months. It probably happened right before I left for winter break.”

“Fuck…” Evan goes quiet for a moment. “I thought you were on the pill,” he says tightly, like he’s looking for any way out of this.

“I am!”

“Well, then how’d this happen?”

“I must have fucked up taking it right!”

“God, Amir...”

“Dude, chill,” Amir says, feeling very surly. “I’m getting an abortion.”

There’s a pause. “Yeah? For real?”

“Bruh! Jesus Christ. Yeah, for real, we can’t have a _baby_ right now.”

“No, I know, I know,” Evan says, then goes quiet for another moment. “I’m really sorry about this… God.”

“It’s fine, but can you just come back? I want you to come back.”

“Yeah.” He’s quiet for a moment, and Amir can hear rustling sounds in the background. “I’m already packing.”

“Already? Don’t you have to stay a few more days?”

“Nah, it’s pretty much a lock, I think. If they need me for a final interview, I’ll just come back up.”

“You’re gonna leave now?”

“Yeah, I’ll leave now. It’s like a three hour drive.”

“Thanks,” Amir murmurs.

“No worries,” Evan says. “Look, I didn’t mean to sound — you just kind of sprang it on me, that’s all.”

“How do you think I feel? I legit, like, ran out of the room when the doctor told me.”

Evan clears his throat. “I’ll be back really soon,” he says.

“Okay.”

“Are you okay?”

Tears prick at Amir’s eyes. “I’m fine,” he says. “Just come back.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Okay.”

*

Greg and Jordan are already out for the night by the time Evan knocks.

Amir rouses from the couch, rubbing at his eyes. He hesitates in front of the door for a moment, then opens it.

Evan looks weatherbeaten and tired. His duffel is slung over his shoulder, and he shifts it as he looks warily at Amir.

“How was your drive?” Amir says, stepping back to let him in.

“Good…” Evan leans over to drop his bag on the floor next to the shoe rack, which sits under a massive poster of Bruce Springsteen and Clarence Clemons kissing. Then he turns back to Amir and wraps him up in a tight hug.

Amir clutches at the back of his shirt, an emotional lump swelling in his throat.

“Sorry,” Evan whispers. “I was stupid on the phone, I was kicking myself the whole drive.”

Amir laughs and nuzzles into his throat, smelling him. “Yeah, you sounded psyched.”

He groans.

“It’s fine, I was surprised too.”

“It was just the last thing I was expecting you to be calling me about.”

Amir’s quiet for a moment. “Did you think I was gonna, like, say I was keeping it?”

“I dunno… I mean, I thought, maybe, y’know. Your dad did that.”

“I’m not my dad.”

“No, I know.”

“So, what — if I kept it, you’d just, like, be okay with that?”

“I mean…” Evan reaches up to stroke his hair. “It would be pretty shitty, yeah, but if you were dead set on it, I’d like… figure out a way to deal… Nah, yeah, of course I’d want to stay together, be a family.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah! What, are you kidding? You think I’d just ditch you after twelve years? I’d ditch our baby?”

“I dunno, thought maybe you’d run away to the woods again.”

“Amir,” Evan says, sounding exasperated.

Amir feels anxiety wrapping its hands around him and squeezing. He backs away from the hug, going over to the couch and dropping onto it. Evan follows him and sits next to him, studying his face with worried eyes.

“Well, I’m not keeping it,” Amir says raspily. “So.”

“Whatever you want,” Evan says.

He stares at the table for a moment, unseeingly, then feels a stab of regret about pulling away and leans back toward Evan. Evan pulls him close and sinks into the couch cushion, caressing his head.

“So,” he says awkwardly, “when are you gonna, like... take care of it?”

“I dunno,” Amir murmurs. “My dad’s handling that. Making the appointment.”

“Your dad?”

“I needed him to find someone who can it privately. I don’t want somebody selling a photo of me at an abortion clinic to TMZ.”

“Shit, right. I forgot people recognize you.”

“It sucks,” Amir says, and is surprised at the swell of grief that rises up in his throat as he says it. Why can’t he be left alone for once? Why can’t he have his privacy?

“Yeah,” Evan agrees. “Well, I’ll take you, once you like… figure everything out.”

“Take me?”

“I’ll go with you and stuff. And take you home. You need someone to take you home after.”

Amir presses his face more firmly into Evan’s chest. He smells like the woods. “How do you know that? I didn’t even know that.”

Evan hesitates, then mumbles, “My sister had one a while ago. When I was like, a kid… my mom took her.”

“Oh…”

“Shit, I shouldn’t tell you that. She wouldn’t want anyone to know.”

“No, it’s okay…” He pets him. “It kind of makes me feel better.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, your sister’s like, really together.”

“Oh. Yeah. I didn’t think about it that way.” Evan strokes his hair. “You shouldn’t feel like you’re not together, though. This is my fault.”

“How is it _your_ fault that I fucked up my birth control?” Amir says, inexplicably annoyed by Evan trying to take away his power to fuck things up.

Evan’s quiet for a moment. “I guess this stuff just happens sometimes.”

“Yeah.”

“So… you didn’t have a feeling, or anything?”

“What, like I was pregnant?”

“Yeah.”

“No,” Amir mutters. “I told you, I thought I was sick.”

“I thought maybe you had a feeling,” Evan says. “It’s been almost three months.”

Amir feels a prickle of nausea. “No, I just thought I was sick. I haven’t gained any weight or anything.” He clears his throat.

Evan gives him a once-over. “Really?”

“Excuse me?” Amir jokes.

“No —“ He laughs. “I’m just saying it’s weird you haven’t, that’s all.”

“I checked when I got home, I’ve gained two pounds. Two pounds is nothing, two pounds is like, you can lose that taking a shit.”

Evan laughs at this, then doesn’t say anything else. A kind of awkward silence develops.

“I was going to say something to you, actually,” Evan says. “Like, about maybe taking a pregnancy test, after you kept saying you felt sick. But then I was like, nah, he’s on the pill, I’m being paranoid…”

Amir’s stomach lurches. “It literally didn’t cross my mind,” he says. “You think I’d have a feeling and not say something to you? Like, ‘Oh shit, we might have a problem?’ I tell you everything.”

“I mean, if you didn’t know for sure, or you were in denial or whatever, I could definitely see you not telling me ‘til you got it confirmed.”

“No,” Amir murmurs. “No… I mean, I could see why you’d think that, ‘cos like… I am kind of like that… but no, I would’ve told you. I wanted to tell you as soon as I left the doctor, but you know how I get when you’re not, like, here… I hate doing shit over the phone, I get anxious.”

“I know,” Evan assures him. “Hey…”

“Yeah.”

“You know I love you, right?”

Hearing it is a relief. “I love you too.”

For the rest of the night they don’t talk about it. They order pizza and watch dumb TV, stuff like guys getting stung by bullet ants on purpose and reruns of Jax Taylor’s spin-off show and VICE documentaries about arms-dealing sex therapists. They laugh and talk shit and crack stupid jokes. Evan makes fun of himself for goofy kiss-ass things he said during his job interview, and Amir giggles.

A few times, Amir wants to say something to him, but he isn’t quite sure what. He still doesn’t know exactly what he wants to hear from Evan, right now, so he just stuffs down the ache and cuddles up closer to him.

It’s fine. It’s enough. Evan pets his hair and keeps him protectively wrapped up in his arms. He isn’t a huge guy, Evan, but if they were boxers, Amir would be a featherweight and Evan would be more of a welterweight. Amir has a wiry strength, but Evan has actual muscles, from chopping wood and hauling water and stuff.

Amir traces his finger down Evan’s bicep. He’s tan, but not in a perfect Los Angeles way. More in a sun damaged, freckled way.

Evan reaches up and wordlessly touches his fingertip to Amir’s. Amir laces their hands together.

MANHATTAN, FEBRUARY 9, 2037

In the morning, Amir wakes in bed with Evan’s arms around him, his alarm making his watch vibrate on his wrist. He can hear Greg and Jordan banging around in the kitchen, and honking traffic in the street below. And rain, too. Shit.

They didn’t have sex last night. They usually would, after reuniting, but it just felt too weird to. They kissed for a long time and that was it. Nobody even got hard. This whole situation is such a boner-killer.

Amir wriggles out of Evan’s grasp and leaves him there in the sheets, dozing, his sunburn now obvious in the harsh morning light. He gazes at him a moment, thinking about how Evan always looks like a golden retriever that just turned into a boy, then strokes his blonde hair back off his forehead and turns to his desk. He scribbles on a Post-it: I WENT 2 CLASS. TEXT U WHEN I GET OUT. U CAN EAT MY CEREAL xx, sticks that to his boyfriend’s arm and dresses quickly.

“Bacon?” Jordan offers as he walks by the kitchen.

“You guys know I don’t eat pigs,” Amir snaps, not even looking up as he scrolls through his missed text messages.

“You’ve been kinda mean lately, Amir,” Greg calls lightheartedly after him as he heads for the front door.

Amir blows him an apologetic kiss. He should be nicer to them, he knows. They’re very cool to let Evan crash here as often as they do. It helps that Greg, Jordan and Evan are all into sports in a way that Amir never has been, so they talk about that a lot. They’ve even been planning on going to Yankees games together once the season starts.

Louis calls him while he’s walking down Broadway, dodging nimbly through the thick Monday rush hour crowd. It’s freezing out but not cold enough to snow, just cold enough to dump rain that’s like icicles, which is pissing him off. Everything is pissing him off. He huddles in his giant North Face, then touches his finger to his watch to enable the call in his Bluetooth earpiece, temporarily muting the chaotic jazz he was listening to.

“Hey love,” Louis says when Amir picks up. “You up?”

“Yeah, I’m on my way to class.”

“Good. So, I got you a consultation, it’s at noon today. It’s with a private clinic, it’s a richy-rich sort of thing… they only see one person at a time when they’re doing abortions, which is what you wanted. And you won’t have to walk by people protesting or anythin’. It’s just a normal doctor’s office.”

“Oh,” Amir says, slowing slightly, and some guy with a computer bag on his shoulder shoves past him impatiently. “Asshole,” he yells after the guy, speeding back up. “Okay.”

“Is that alright? I know you’ve just got the morning class Wednesdays, and I thought you’d want to get moving on this as fast as possible.”

“Yeah, no, it’s good. Thanks Dad. Can you like, um… just text me where it is and stuff?”

“‘Course. So, how are you?”

“I’m fine,” Amir says, feeling queasy at being asked. “Just, like. Anxious.”

“Yeah,” Louis says softly. “I know.”

“I’ll let you know what they say,” Amir says, wanting to end this conversation. “Um, by the way, Evan came back after I told him.”

“Good, good.”

“Yeah. So he’s going to go with me and take me home and stuff.”

“Good,” Louis says again, sounding relieved.

“How’s your album going?” Amir says, for once desperately wanting for the conversation to not be about him.

He stops at an intersection, and a car speeds by, splashing everyone who’s waiting with dirty city water. He immediately and very insistently aims a middle finger at them as they drive away.

“Wonderful,” Louis says. “Really good. Getting a really interesting sound going. Actually, I’d like to plagiarize Zayn a bit — would you mind doing some session work for me, playing piano on one of my tracks? Lay it down while you’re home for the summer? You’ll get paid nicely, we’ll go through the studio and everything. No illegal child labor.”

The light changes, and Amir starts crossing the street amongst a clump of damp commuters. He turns the corner, and the triangular, aggressive architecture of Alice Tully Hall looms into view. It looks like a shark mouth welcoming people into its maw.

“Sure, definitely,” Amir says, then adds with some anxiety: “I actually haven’t heard from Dad about that, for like, months…”

“Oh, that’s got nothing to do with you,” Louis says. “He’s stalled on that album. Between you and me, he’s going through some work drama right now, trying to switch labels.”

“What? Why?”

“Well, he’s been buddied back up with Payno lately, and now he’s gotten it in his head he should go over to Capitol ‘cos they’ll treat him better.”

“And Liam’s egging him on?”

“Liam’s just so chuffed the two of them are cool again, I don’t think he quite knows what to do with himself,” Louis says.

“Alright, I won’t take being ghosted personally, then.”

“Oh, never take being ghosted by your dad personally, love.” Louis pauses, then adds, “Look, again, this is just between you and me, but I think he’s sort of feeling the pressure since Harry is taking some time off, y’know? He feels like he really has to make the most of having this sort of momentary freedom from being so responsible for their girls.”

“Yeah,” Amir mutters, experiencing the stab of resentful grief he gets every time he thinks about his dad being a stay-at-home parent for his new, beautiful Harry family. 

“Listen, I’ll let you go, but have a good class, yeah? And let me know what they say at the, ahh… appointment.”

Amir clears his throat. “I will.”

They hang up with each other, and Amir briefly considers texting Mia. He does want to confess this to her almost more than anyone, because he thinks she’d be able to make him feel a little more lighthearted about it. He’s just afraid. It would be easier in person; he hates doing stuff over the phone.

Besides her, there’s no one else he wants to tell. Zayn would want to kill Evan with his bare hands if he found out. His friends probably wouldn’t understand or be able to relate; most of them are guys who can’t get pregnant, none of them are in long-term relationships, and some of them are even still virgins. Being so into music that you make it to Juilliard doesn’t bode well for most people’s social lives.

Louis is probably the only person who understands, but does he, even? He’s never had an abortion. He kept his accidents.

Amir feels a stab of hurt thinking about this. He’s not keeping this baby because he doesn’t want his life to get fucked up, but does that mean he fucked up his own dad’s life? Did he wreck things for Louis, him and Mia both? His dad had wanted a baby, though, or at least that’s what he tells them. He always says that was a weird time when the relentless routine of the band was ending, and his kids were like this lovely new phase of his life.

But maybe that’s just what he told himself. How bad can you want a baby, to derail your whole life and career for the sake of it? Couldn’t Louis have just gotten pregnant again later, when he was married and older? He says he loved them really early on, though. But if that’s possible, then why does Amir only feel like he’s picked up an intestinal parasite? He doesn’t feel love. He just has this panicked need to no longer be pregnant. Under what conditions would that love exist? What if he never feels it?

How did Louis do it? How did he find it in him to love and nurture them, and be so patient with them, and not resent them?

Amir thought he wanted a baby someday — he thought he wanted Evan’s baby, specifically. But that was fantasy, and now real life is here to intrude.

His head is starting to swim. He jettisons these thoughts before they run away with him. Rain continues to patter off the hood of his jacket as he moves along, hard drops hitting him in the head and neck.

*

Amir barely pays attention in his lecture, just drumming his fingers on his desk and looking at dumb stuff on the internet the whole time as his professor drones. He’ll get the notes from someone else, it’s fine. It’s his jazz literature class, so all he has to do to survive the semester is bullshit five or six essays. And he’s very good at bullshit.

When he’s finally released he doesn’t even bother waiting for his friends in that class, who he purposely sat away from. He just wants to see Evan; he wants to go chill with him somewhere. He’s thinking maybe they can go to the park and smoke some weed, when he steps outside and gets a face full of frigid February rain. Right. Well, never mind on that, but they can smoke some weed in his apartment.

But when he texts Evan _i’m out of class_ , Evan texts back, _okay. I’m across town at my sister’s place_

 _????_ Amir says, without really stopping to consider this response. It’s like he’s been flayed and is walking around without his skin; everything feels like a personal slight. When the T.A. handed back their in-class writings from last week, he’d been minorly emotionally devastated by what Professor Tiller wrote on his: _Amir, there are so many great ideas here, but they’re more tenuously linked than I am used to seeing from you. I noticed you turned this in after only 20 minutes — please take the whole hour next time! **87**. _It was like being slapped in the face. He never gets Bs.

 _??_ Evan says back.

_for how long?_

_idk, i told her i was in town and she wanted to get brunch and show me around her work... do you want to meet up with us?_

Amir wants to smack him, and he barely even knows why. _not really,_ he types back furiously, sidestepping other pedestrians as he heads for the subway station stairs at the end of this block.

He hates the train, but he needs to get out of this disgusting weather, and he knows letting a self-driving Uber lurch him stop-and-go through Manhattan traffic would churn his nausea up into a full-on vomit. He’s resolved not to let himself puke. It’s just too cliched. If he doesn’t puke, it’s like he isn’t even pregnant, really. He can pretend the abortion is a root canal.

 _okay,_ Evan says, after typing for a while. He’s clearly wary of pissing Amir off. Amir feels a little niggle of guilt. _any reason why or_

_I have a drs appointment this afternoon is why. im heading there right now_

_ohhh okay,_ Evan says. _what_ _for?_

Amir’s good and annoyed now. _to schedule an abortion evan……… wtf are you smoking_

 _i mean that’s what i figured it was, i just didnt want to assume,_ Evan says. _i can come with you if you want_

_Nah man go see your sister_

_really its fine i can see her whenever. she’s just working on a cool exhibit right now and wanted to show me. i havent seen her in a while cause of how things have been with me and my parents_

_i wasbt being a dick,_ Amir types, misspelling from how fast his fingers move when he’s upset. _hang out with her. its fine. maybe the three of us can get dinner or something_

He starts heading down the stairs, into the damp, humid air of the subway, the smell of pennies and piss filling his nostrils. He does, a little bit, wish that Evan would insist, “No, I’ll cancel. I’ll come with you to the appointment.” But he’s not going to admit to that.

 _okay,_ Evan says back. _ill ask her_

_thanks. im getting on the train, might not get texts for a while_

That’s a lie. The subway gets almost perfect data service now. But Evan wouldn’t know that, because he never rides it, he takes Ubers or walks. He says doesn’t like being underground.

 _okay_ , Evan says.

_*_

Amir has to sit in the plush, cushy waiting room for a while. Too long. This office is an ob-gyn practice, apparently, which makes sense, but it means there are two visibly pregnant people waiting along with him, one woman and one guy. He refuses to look at them; they give him the willies.

A blonde nurse finally comes to fetch him and introduces herself as Courtney. Amir follows her down the hall, his palms sweaty and prickly. From what he read online, she’s going to counsel him now, and ask him why he wants an abortion. He has this irrational fear that if anyone interrogates his decision too much, he’s going to lose his mind Louis-style and come over with wanting to keep it. Like the baby itself will hijack his brain. No, that’s insane, it’s the size of a strawberry.

Even a strawberry is too big, though. The idea of a strawberry-sized foreign body in his stomach makes him dizzy with unease.

He thinks about parasites then, things he learned about in AP Bio: that disease that’s in cat litter, and wasps and fungi and worms. They’re all much smaller than a strawberry. As Courtney welcomes him into a room and offers him a seat, anxiety rises and churns in his chest until he thinks he actually might throw up.

 _I don’t want it,_ he sternly reminds himself. _I don’t want it. I know I don’t want it. I’m nineteen. I want to party and go to class and sleep in late and travel and get high whenever I want._

Slowly the grip of panic eases.

“So I just have to ask you a few questions,” Courtney says, sitting on a rolling chair and moving toward him, a tablet in her hand. “We got your records from your school’s health service, so I have all that information already… You’ll be eleven weeks pregnant soon, which means we’ll have to perform a surgical abortion.”

“Surgical,” Amir repeats with a little thrill of anxiety; he hates surgery. “I’d like, get put under?”

“Not necessarily,” she says. “We can do it while you’re awake, with mild sedation.”

“What’s better?”

“Well, some people — maybe more sensitive people — find the procedure painful, and others prefer to not be aware of what’s going on, so we offer full sedation. Do you think you’d want that?”

Amir runs his finger along the plastic arm of the chair, thinking of that Ramones song that his dads love. _I wanna be sedated!_ “Yeah,” he says. “Probably.”

“Okay. It’s a short procedure, so we’ll give you just a little bit of anesthesia.”

“Will it hurt after?”

“You’ll have some discomfort, possibly some pain. We’ll give you medication for that.”

“And then I just go home?”

“Yes, you’ll spend some time recovering here, and then the person you came with will take you home.”

Amir chews on the inside of his cheek. “It’ll be my boyfriend.”

Courtney nods. “Sure.”

“Can he be with me when it happens?”

He regrets it as soon as he says it; he doesn’t actually want Evan there, that sounds ghoulish and upsetting, especially if he’ll be unconscious.

“I’m sorry… doctors and nurses only. But if you want, I can be in there with you.”

“Okay,” Amir says. “It’s just, going under scares me.”

“Well, like I said, we don’t have to put you under.”

“No, I don’t want to be awake.” He doesn’t want to be unconscious either, though, he just wants this to have never happened. Fuck. “It’s fine. You’ll be there?”

Courtney smiles. “I’ll be there. Listen, it’s not a big deal, medically. I know it sounds like it is, but getting your wisdom teeth out is actually a lot more invasive.”

“More invasive than putting a vacuum in me?”

“Your teeth are connected to bone,” she counters. “And pretty firmly attached to your head.”

Amir sits with that for a moment. He misses Evan, suddenly.

Courtney must mistake the look on his face for something else, because she takes that moment to gently say, “I have to make sure, first, that you’re aware of all your options, and this is definitely what you want.”

Amir nods and ducks his gaze. “Yeah.”

“You know your options?”

Amir laughs. “Um. Have a baby and be a dad when I’m twenty and going to school. Have a baby and put it up for adoption, which just, no offense, sounds completely wack and unfair. Plus it’s something famous people don’t ever do.”

“Actually, some have,” Courtney offers.

“Well, whatever, I don’t care. I’m not gonna give my baby away to some rando anyway. I want an abortion.”

“Okay.”

“I’ve thought about it a lot, trust me, I think a lot about everything. You don’t need to mom me, I promise I’m not gonna sue you.”

“Okay,” Courtney says again, with a microexpression of frustration like he’s being a difficult patient. “But you can change your mind at any time, okay? Right up until the procedure.”

No, no, no, don’t say that. Lock this decision in now.

Amir is letting his brain run away with him, he knows. He hears Zayn’s soft, accented voice in his head: _Take a couple deep breaths. Let your body relax. Slow down._

“Okay,” Amir says.

“So how do you think this happened?” Courtney says. “Did you have unprotected sex?”

“I, uh… I’m on the pill, but we don’t use, um, condoms.” He looks down at his hands. “I guess I wasn’t, like — I thought if I missed a day I could just take two the next day.”

“And that’s a progestin-only pill? That’s what we prescribe to men.”

Amir shrugs helplessly. “I guess.”

She writes this down. “Have you ever missed multiple days in a row?”

“Maybe. Maybe, when I was stressed out around finals, I might’ve forgotten for like, two days in a row,” he admits.

That would’ve been when he got pregnant, the time around finals. Amir was drinking a lot at parties, having fun with Evan, blowing off steam, getting in the Christmas spirit, fucking him drunkenly as soon as they got home. He wasn’t thinking.

“Did your doctor not counsel you that you really have to take that at around the same time of day, every single day, and use a backup method if you miss a day?” Courtney says.

“No one ever said anything like that to me,” Amir says, anger flaring in his chest. “I went to student health, they prescribed me it, that was it.”

“Okay, okay. That’s negligent of them, but just so you know, that is how that pill works.”

Great.

“Your biology is different from a woman’s, in several ways,” she adds. “Your, you know, reproductive capacity evolved from one single ancestor’s mutation on the XY chromosome. You’re not a woman. So unlike us, you can get pregnant at any time of the month — although you do have natural peaks of fertility that correspond to your hormones. That’s affected by everything around you… you’re actually more likely to get pregnant in the wintertime.”

“Fuck,” Amir says. “I never knew that. Nobody ever told me that.”

“Yeah,” Courtney says sympathetically. “We do a really bad job educating omega boys, since you’re the minority. Honestly, you should be pulled out for sex ed and be given separate classes, because I think they end up skipping over a lot of the nitty-gritty so they don’t make the other boys uncomfortable.”

Amir doesn’t tend to think about this much, although now he figures maybe he should start. Louis wanted to discuss it with him when he was younger, and he resisted. It’s gross. Having a body is gross, and vulnerable, and all too human. None of his biggest jazz idols have bodies — they’re all dead now, they exist only in their bodies of work and impossibly cool black-and-white photos of them sitting behind pianos or blowing into saxophones.

“Alright, so, pregnancy due to birth control failure,” Courtney says, jotting this down. “Was the sex consensual?”

The question jars him. Amir doesn’t like all the fuzzy consent talk you get in college; it makes him think about the sex he’s had while he was gone-wasted, and reevaluate if he’s supposed to think it was okay or not. “Yeah, it was with my boyfriend.”

“He’s the father?”

“Yep. Did not get raped, did not cheat on my boyfriend. Just don’t want to have this baby.”

“Okay, I understand.” Courtney continues to write. “Have you ever been pregnant before?”

“No.”

“Have you felt pressured by anyone to terminate this pregnancy?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Myself.”

Courtney frowns at him. “I’d prefer a straight answer.”

“No, no one pressured me,” Amir says quietly.

“Have you told anyone about your decision?”

“My boyfriend and my dad.”

“Are they both supportive?”

Amir nods.

“Okay…” Courtney writes some more. “So, you a UCLA fan?” she says, as if trying to lighten the mood.

Amir is confused; she points to his chest, and he looks down. Bruins sweatshirt.

“No,” he says. “Well, I mean, yeah, I guess. My sister plays soccer for them.”

“Really? That’s cool. What position?”

“Uhh… left back?”

“Fullback?”

“Yeah.”

“You must be proud of her,” she says. “That’s a tough school, athletically.”

“Yeah, I am,” Amir says, although the toughness of UCLA is usually something that’s communicated to him by a third party. Not that he doesn’t deeply admire Mia, because he does and always has, but he has no perspective on what it takes to succeed at college athletics. She probably feels the same way about him being at Juilliard.

Courtney passes a couple pamphlets over to him and starts talking about dates and times and a pill he has to take four hours before his abortion and blah blah blah. When it’s all over and he’s paid his co-pay, he walks out of the office in a daze, clutching a prescription for the pill and an appointment reminder sheet for Monday. February 14. Valentine’s Day. Ha. It was the earliest time she could schedule it, so, fine. He feels kind of defiant about it, and appreciates the drama. Very _Valley of the Dolls_ to get an abortion on Valentine’s Day; maybe he should show up to it whacked out on barbiturates.

He texts Louis, _i made an appointment for monday_

 _Okay good,_ Louis says. _love you._

_love you too_

Amir thinks with jealousy of how on Monday, Liam and Louis will probably be having some romantic dinner, and Zayn will take Harry out on the boat, and Aya will take Mia up in a hot-air balloon or some shit, and he’s going to go get his insides vacuumed.

*

He rides the subway home on autopilot, keeping his mind on his homework and the gig he’s playing with his band next weekend and a crazy crime podcast he’s been listening to lately. He’s managed to put the whole thing out of his head until a pregnant guy gets onto the train.

Amir jumps up to give him his seat, backing away like he’s contagious and grabbing onto a pole. The guy smiles at him and says thanks; Amir manages a terse grimace back. He must look like the rudest do-gooder ever. He feels queasy again.

He keeps thinking of his siblings as babies. The twins, and then the girls. They were so _annoying_. Their snuffling and crying and sucking on bottles, their dirty diapers. Having a baby in the house was like having a very rude guest who never left.

He once went to Max and Patrick’s cribs, shortly after they were born, and pinched Max until he cried. He’s not proud of that, but he was already so sick of them. He never wanted to be the middle child of seven kids, split between two families. The middle child everywhere he went! It was such an indignity for somebody like him, who was always convinced he was special.

Amir remembers something else, too: the summer before he started high school, when Mia and her soccer teammates had just gotten busted for drinking at a party, and the twins were sick with a nightmarish norovirus that was making them projectile vomit. He was walking by Louis and Liam’s bedroom, late, and heard his dad upset while Liam quietly tried to comfort him.

“I can’t do this anymore,” Louis was saying raggedly. “I can’t. Five kids… I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

“It’s just a few more years like this, and then we’ll have three of them out of the house.”

“A few more years… Liam, this has been my life for the last eight. I don’t feel like a person anymore, I don’t! I have no idea who I am lately, I barely think about myself. I’m so tired… I feel so alone, I get so angry at the kids sometimes. It scares me how angry I get at them.”

“Am I not home often enough?”

“No, but I still feel so many of the little things just fall to me!”

“That’s not on. We’re completely a team, we’re partners in this. I feel like we’ve just got different roles.”

“THEN TRADE ME FOR A WHILE,” Louis screamed at him.

“I can’t be the one to discipline your daughter!” Liam exclaimed.

“Why not? She listens to you!”

“I’m her stepdad, that only goes so far! Look, I don’t understand what you’re asking of me, Tommo. I’m a completely hands-on dad. I’m always ready to jump in and take them all on an outing when you want to just lay around and smoke some weed.”

“Is that really what you think I do when you take them off my hands?” Louis spit at him.

“That’s not what I meant, that didn’t come out right —“

“Honestly, most of the time I’m trying to get work done, or talk to me friends!”

“The band just went on tour last year, wasn’t that some us time?”

“That was work! We were _working_ , I barely spoke to you about anything besides that! And I spent half me downtime taking care of the twins and taking phone calls about the other kids! ‘Who likes bananas? Who fucking doesn’t like bananas? Has Amir had his fucking tetanus, ‘cos he’s just bashed his head off a rusty gate!’”

“Zayn could’ve called me with those,” Liam says petulantly.

“Yeah, don’t hold your breath for that.”

“Hey, hey, look. Let’s plan a trip. Just you and me, or just you, even. We’ll hit a festival. Glastonbury? No, wait, that just ended,” Liam said, a bit frantically, and Louis let out a hiccupy laugh. “Any festival. We’ll leave the kids with family and just go somewhere. And you can’t feel guilty for leaving them, ‘cos it’s a festival, so it’s sort of like we’re working, almost. Getting ideas and things.”

“I’d still feel guilty,” Louis said quietly. “Feel like shit right now, even, with the boys so sick and I can barely do anything to make them feel better… ‘s’all I’ve even thought about.”

A chill ran down Amir’s spine at hearing this, though he barely understood the implications of what he was hearing. He walked off down the hallway feeling shocked and unsettled, like he did when he accidentally saw his grandma undressing. Louis was being smothered by them? Louis didn’t know if he could go on, because they were so much to deal with? He felt like he must have misunderstood what he heard, even after Liam gathered the kids for a powwow that night and begged them to please take it easy on Louis and be good for the rest of the summer.

Now Amir can’t even remember if they actually complied with this directive or not. He never appreciated Louis as being an actual human being, back then.

He’s been on the train for twenty minutes before he finally works up the nerve to text Evan, _scheduled it for monday. happy valentines day lol_

 _Oh shit,_ Evan says back. _okay_

 _yeah_ , Amir says. They don’t usually go in big for Valentine’s Day, but still.

_i’m coming with you right?_

_if you want,_ Amir says self-protectively.

_Dude you know i hate when you do that. just say you want me there or not. You didn’t answer when i offered before_

_bc it’s not up to me, either you want to be there or you don’t_

_Lol,_ Evan says. _do you not want me there?_

Amir wants him there very much, he just doesn’t know how to say that without making it a whole big emotional thing. He doesn’t want to be needy like that.

 _no i do want you there,_ he writes back, feeling really small.

_Okay good. what do we bring?_

_bring?_ Amir says, bemused. _Lol nothing_

_but can you eat after?_

_she said they’re gonna give me stuff in the recovery room_

_what kind of stuff?_

_she said like crackers, apple juice_

_You don’t like apple juice,_ Evan points out. _i’ll bring pomegranate juice._

A lump rises in his throat. He starts typing, stops, erases, starts again, then stops. Finally he says, _so what’s the move? i’m heading home now_

_i’m just hanging out with Rachel and Alex and a couple of their stanford friends. drinking at their place_

_okay,_ Amir says. _wait isn’t alex like a congressman now_

_yeah he still drinks like crazy though_

_but are You drinking? he’s a congressman drinking with a 20 year old is what i meant_

_OHHH lmao. I don’t even think about that stuff, you know how these guys are. i’m only drinking a little bit anyway... Rach wants me to facetime Henry with her so i’m trying to get a little lit first_

Henry is Evan’s asshole younger brother who’s taken over his mantle as heir to the family business. As far as Amir knows, they haven’t talked in at least six months. He didn’t even acknowledge Evan’s birthday back in October.

 _got it,_ Amir says. He’s a little worried. Evan being around his family isn’t good for him; even Rachel, who’s usually the cool one, often tries to talk him back into the fold.

Amir didn’t truly understand why Evan rejected his life’s planned trajectory until last fall, when he finally opened up about all of the realizations he’d had in the past year about the family business. Evan told Amir a bunch of truly scary shit about how The Stewart Group has worked to undermine journalism on climate change in America, fired reporters who insisted on linking natural disasters to it, and takes investment money from shady Saudi oil barons.

This was stuff they hadn’t thought about much in high school. Evan had always planned to go to an Ivy and work at his dad’s company, because that was what everyone told him he was going to do. Getting kicked out of Groton, making so-so grades — none of it mattered, because his parents could buy the SAT tutors and buy the amazing extracurriculars and get him installed at whatever school they wanted. Maybe not Harvard, but Brown or something.

And then the three of them got arrested, and it was like Evan woke up from a dream. He stopped talking about college. He started being honest about what he wanted and how he felt. He told Amir he had feelings for him. It was part of the reason Amir could fall in love with him after knowing him his whole life: it was like he became a different person when he finally knew himself, which let Amir see him in a new light. He was more adult, but in some ways like a child; the child he had never really gotten to be, dreaming his own dreams for the future. Life had become real to him for the very first time.

Evan doesn’t care about money or power. He never actually had. He doesn’t even crave expensive things and luxury the way Amir does. He just wants somebody to tell him they’re okay with the simple, intuitive way he sees the world.

Amir is so okay with it. He loves Evan. They’re very different, but that’s exactly why he does. Amir is neurotic and painstaking and vain, prone to flights of fancy, prone to self-imploding when he can’t work things out. He needs Evan. He needs him right now more than ever, and feels childishly possessive of him and protective of him from his family. He likes Rachel, he always has, and she loves Evan, but she doesn’t truly want what’s best for him. She’s too blinded by their upbringing to realize what’s best for him is to be as far away from all that as possible.

There’s no golden, selfless Stewart to be found, and no other black sheep but Evan. His aging and eccentric socialite of a grandmother is nice to Amir, but he knows it’s out of courtesy to Evan. Evan’s mom is a pillhead who barely notices what’s going on around her anymore. His aunts, uncles and cousins are various flavors of narcissist and sociopath. His grandfather, luckily long dead, used to literally hunt rhinos. And his dad is a blowhard who’s absolutely ripshit that his first-born son has rejected his birthright.

None of them truly understand him. They never will. But on some level Evan still so badly wants them to. Amir can tell that he still thinks that one of these days, if he can just explain himself well enough, they’ll finally accept him. He thinks he doesn’t have the right words; he can’t believe that they just don’t have the empathy. Somehow it’s easier for him to blame himself.

Amir wants to text him, _just leave, come home now, dont drink with them. don’t be with your sister’s friends. come be with me when we’re going through this crappy thing and all i can think about is how maybe i ruined my dad’s life by being born._

That would be selfish, though. He’s trying to be less selfish. It was his big New Year’s resolution.

*

When he gets back, Amir goes down the hall to his friend Indira’s apartment. Greg and Jordan are still in class, and he can’t stand being alone right now — the emptiness of the apartment feels like a hand around his throat. Plus, he needs something to distract him from all the texts he’s not answering. Mostly the ones from Mia. She says she misses him and wants to FaceTime soon. Well, boohoo, Mia, I can’t talk to you, because if I do I’m going to cry. And not a manly, restrained little cry, a snotty disgusting cry, because I’m suddenly rethinking my right to exist. Yours too, actually.

But if Mia was a love child, what was he? An obligation child?

Indira rattles around her tiny kitchen looking for herbal tea, chattering about the drama currently going down in the theater program. Amir met her at a party, and she’s kind of a mess, which is why he likes her. Most of his music program friends are so normal and uptight that they’re borderline boring. But Indira’s apartment is covered in tapestries and crystals, and most of her texts to him are urgent notes about how his Pisces sun, Sagittarius moon, and rising Leo are all dramatically impacting his life.

“Soo, what have you been up to?” Indira chirps, stuffing two teabags into a chipped Famous Dave’s mug.

Amir wants so badly to tell someone who’s impartial, and Indira is one of the only people he knows here who wouldn’t secretly judge him, so he just comes out with it. “I’m actually having kind of a weird week,” he says. “I’m, um… I’m getting an abortion on Monday.”

She gasps and comes to sit beside him on the couch, her green eyes wide. “God, I’m sorry. That sucks.”

“Yeah,” Amir admits, clearing his throat. “I’m a little freaked out.”

“Yeah, totally…” She pets his back. “Whose is it? Is it that blonde guy, the one I met at your guys’s last party?”

“Yeah, my boyfriend. Evan.”

“He seemed like a good guy.”

“He is a good guy.”

“Good… is he being cool about it?”

“He is,” Amir mutters, looking down at his hands in his lap. “I just feel like we’re both so freaked out that it’s kind of hard to talk about it, or whatever. But he offered to come and everything.”

“That’s a good sign,” Indira says, sounding sincere.

“Yeah,” he says again, and hiccups.

“Listen,” she whispers conspiratorially. “I have a little coke. Do you want a bump?”

He should say no. He isn’t in the right headspace, and it’s just dumb, anyway. He isn’t even at a party or something to get good use out of it. But Amir finds himself nodding like he’s a puppet. Some force has taken him over, now, this thing that grips him sometimes — like a little voice way back in his head. It tells him to give into all his whims and impulses. _Do it do it do it do it do it._

“Okay,” Amir agrees.

Ten minutes later, they’re both jazzed out of their minds, laughing about nothing. It’s not great quality stuff, but Amir hasn’t done coke in a while — he tries to stick to Adderall — so the head rush is hitting him really hard. He feels _great_ in a way he hasn’t for days. He feels like his best self: swaggering, cool, above it all. It’s such a relief.

His watch keeps dinging with texts. He puts it on do not disturb.

He wants to do _something,_ anything, so he and Indira go out into the freezing cold and head across the street to Central Park, beelining for the zoo. They buy hot nuts and huddle puffy-coated in the heated room outside the snow leopard enclosure, waiting for it to come out from behind some rocks.

After a while, Indira’s soft voice breaks through the quiet. “I had an abortion once.”

Amir turns to look at her, not processing what she said at first. “Seriously?”

“In high school.” She touches her knuckles to the glass of the enclosure, her wide eyes even wider from the coke, her pupils large. “My boyfriend was, um... kind of shitty to me. I was afraid to have a kid with him. But it ended up being a good thing, since I ended up getting into Juilliard.”

“Shit,” Amir says, sadness cutting into his high. “Shit, I’m sorry. That’s so rough.”

Indira nods.

Now he understands her fixation on Evan being a good guy — she was worried about him. He feels an intense surge of affection for her, part coke and part real.

“What was it like?” he says quietly. “The abortion?”

She shrugs. “It was fine. I actually haven’t thought about it in forever.”

“Was it scary, at all?”

“No, no. It wasn’t a big deal.”

This heartens him to hear. They fall quiet.

“Want to go get some actual food?” Amir offers.

“Sure,” she says.

*

His high has worn off by the time they get back to their building and part ways. Amir’s head starts pounding, and he feels restless and sick. He wants more coke, but he’s not going to do any more, so he just has to ride out the comedown.

When he gets into his apartment he stands there swaying for a moment, then runs into the kitchen and throws up in the sink. So much for not puking.

He rinses it down the drain, dry heaving at the sight of his half-digested imitation-meat burger. He can hear Jordan listening to music in his room down the hall, and then the sound of a door opening; he turns and sees Evan coming out of his bedroom.

“Hey,” Evan says. He pads over in sock feet. “Where’ve you been?”

“With a friend,” Amir says.

“You okay?”

Amir closes his eyes, gritting his teeth against the throbbing in his head. “Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

“I dunno.” Evan stops next to him and stuffs his hands awkwardly in his pockets. “I, ah… I had the feeling earlier that you were a little pissed.”

He sounds slurred and sleepy. Amir wonders how much he drank.

“I’ve been feeling weird and shitty,” Evan offers. “I thought maybe you were too.”

“Yeah, well, I’m the one with the parasite.”

“Hey, don’t, please,” Evan says. “Don’t be mad at it. Be mad at me.”

“I’m mad at myself.” He grips the edge of the counter, trying not to snap at Evan, but the urge is bubbling up under his skin.

Evan tips his face into Amir’s sightline. Amir meets his eyes.

“Your pupils are huge,” he points out.

“I did some shitty coke,” Amir says. “So maybe stop hassling me, ‘cos I’m not in a great mood.”

Evan laughs good-naturedly. “What’d you do shitty coke for?”

“‘Cos it was there.”

Evan’s looking at him funny, now. Great. He has that face people get when they’re looking at him but thinking about Zayn.

“Kind of weird to snort coke when you’re pregnant,” he says.

Amir reels at this. “The fuck? I’m not keeping it, I’ll do whatever I want!”

“I know, but still —“

“But still what? You don’t get to boss me around just ‘cos this is happening.”

“Amir,” Evan says patiently. “I’m just worried about you.”

“I’m fucking fine,” Amir snaps. “I was just bored. I didn’t want to come back here and sit around waiting for you.”

“Meer…” Evan reaches out for him, but Amir shies away.

“I’m gonna go for a walk,” he says.

“It’s like twenty degrees out.”

Amir makes a big show of going over to the futon he had tossed his scarf and puffy coat on, zipping the latter up all the way and wrapping the former around his neck so many times that his mouth and nose are obscured. He’s starting to cry, and he doesn’t want Evan to see.

“Amir,” Evan says in exasperation. “Please, can you just tell me what’s wrong?”

Amir ignores him, heading out the front door and swiping the keyless entry locked with his watch. He races down the stairs, claustrophobic and clammy and desperate for fresh air. Suddenly he wants nothing more than to be out with Zayn on his sailboat, to escape to the ocean, talking with him about music and life while the California coast passes by on their right.

Amir feels his distance from his family like a knife lodged in his throat as tears stream down his cheeks. They’re so far away, and he feels so sick and so crappy.

He wanders into the alley next to his apartment building, tears streaming down his face, and hides behind an empty Dumpster. It’s pretty gross back there, but he just needs to be away from the world for a moment. Manhattan is so stuffed with people, especially at rush hour. He sits down on a plastic crate, and without even thinking about it, activates his earpiece so he can call Louis on his watch.

“Hello?” Louis says.

Amir tugs his scarf down, wincing as it snags on his nose ring. “Hi,” he chokes out, hiccuping. “Are you busy?”

“Ohhh,” Louis groans, and Amir hears him setting stuff down and maybe closing a laptop. “I, ahh… no. What’s wrong?”

“Never mind,” Amir sniffles.

“Amir. Come on. What’s wrong?”

His watch dings with a text from Evan: _amir seriously youre scaring me_

“Nothing,” Amir says automatically, then reflects on how absurd a lie that is. He inhales. “I don’t know why I keep crying so much.”

“You’re hormonal,” Louis says gently.

Gross. “I’m, um. I’m just not handling things well, I don’t think.”

“Do you want me to fly out?”

“No, no! Don’t. Dad, I’m fine, I swear to God.”

“Alright, alright. I just know you’re under a lot of stress with school and things.”

“I’m not a baby,” he protests.

Louis laughs. “You are, though, you’re my baby. You’ll always be my baby, sorry.”

Amir starts crying so hard, then, that he feels like he might choke to death. He’s blubbering and wheezing.

“Sweetheart,” Louis says in his ear. “Please calm down. Just tell me what’s wrong.”

Slowly he hiccups himself back from the brink, shivering against the wall he’s leaning on. His tears and snot are growing cold on his hot face, and he wipes them away with the end of the scarf.

“I want a hug,” he says pathetically. He wants Louis to give him one of those koala hugs he did when Amir was a little boy, completely enveloping him and sheltering him from the world.

He was probably too hard on his parents when he was a kid, he’s just now realizing. In his own memory, he was always crying, always mad about something — their divorce came at a tender age for him, and was impossible for him to reckon with. He didn’t ever really get over it. But Louis and Zayn were nothing but nurturing, for the first couple years afterward. They cuddled him and sang to him and told him it was all okay. The exasperation only came later, when they were trying to move on and make new families, and Amir was so grief-stricken about it that all he could think to do was act out.

“Oh, love,” Louis says, sounding pained. “I wish I could hug you. Talk to me, though, tell me what’s wrong.”

“I just, um.” Amir drags in a shaky breath. “I feel like, really fucked up about this whole thing, ‘cos I don’t feel anything about this baby, and I don’t want it. But you got pregnant when you weren’t that much older than me, and you say you loved us and wanted to keep us, and you did, and you had us and stayed at home with us and did all this stuff for us…”

“Erm,” Louis says, after a moment of expectant silence from Amir. “Yes, all those things are true.”

“Well, so, like. What’s wrong with me?”

“Oh, absolutely nothing! I’m very relieved you don’t want a baby right now.”

“But am I just never going to be a dad, ‘cos I don’t actually want to do it?” He chokes up, then tearfully says, “I thought I did want to, someday.”

Louis lets out a pained sigh. “Amir, I can’t tell you whether or not you want to be a dad,” he says. “But you’re not being selfish by having an abortion. You’re so young, you’re in school, and Evan is just figuring things out. Having a baby isn't right for anyone in this situation.”

“But it wasn’t for you either. You were all confused and like, going through this crazy shit, and angry at Dad, you guys weren’t even _talking_ , and he was going through all his shit, and maybe if he hadn’t had us he wouldn’t have been an alcoholic, or maybe you could have had a bigger career like you wanted to have, like you’re trying to have now, but you had to wait twenty freaking _years_ —“ Louis tries to interrupt him here, but he steamrolls ahead: “I mean, would you have even married Dad if you weren’t pregnant with me?”

“Hey,” Louis barks. “Enough. Amir, don’t blame yourself for any of that. Do you hear me? I am so grateful you and your sister exist, I have absolutely zero regrets about being your dad. Zayn doesn’t blame either of you in the slightest for anything he’s gone through. In fact, the reason he’s been able to stay clean and have the career he’s had is ‘cos he wants to be a good father and role model for you and your sisters. So please, stop this nonsense. I love you and Mia more, and am more proud of you, than I could ever in me life properly express to you. Someday when you do decide to have your own baby, you’ll understand.”

Amir cries more, but it’s a less sad kind of cry, more of an overwhelmed one. His watch dings some more like Evan is trying to text him, but he can’t see the screen through his tears. He hears a garbage truck rolling by on the street outside the alley, and then someone screaming, “LOOK WHERE YOU’RE FUCKIN’ GOING!” A chuckle slips through his tears, and he remembers that he actually likes living in New York. The chaos is comforting.

“Amir?” Louis says, his voice gentle but firm.

“I just still don’t get it,” Amir finally says. “Like, the reason why I don’t want this baby at all. You said you couldn’t imagine having aborted either of us, but I’m feeling like I can’t imagine having this baby.”

Louis exhales again; a long and thin sound, this time. “Right, I’m going to tell you something,” he says. “And don’t you repeat this to fuckin’ anyone. Not even your sister.”

Amir quiets down, sniffling into the silence (relative silence, as there’s now a full-blown screaming match happening on the sidewalk outside the alley now, and cars honking). He huddles inside his jacket, still shivering.

“I’ve been pregnant four times in my life,” Louis says, after a long moment. “Your dad and I got pregnant again when me and him were separated.”

Amir’s head starts to spin. No, he wants to say — that doesn’t make any sense, wouldn’t we have known if you were pregnant? Then he crashes back to reality: of course he could have hid that. Holy shit.

“I was going to have an abortion. I scheduled it, everything, I was set on it. And then I, ah, I lost the baby.”

“Lost it?”

“I ‘ad a miscarriage, love. Just one of those things. But I don’t have a doubt in my mind that I would’ve gotten that abortion.”

Amir sits there, breathless from shock.

“Another baby, y’know… it would’ve been terrible for me, right when I was trying to revive my solo career. It would’ve been bad for your dad when he was working so hard to get sober. It would’ve been bad for you kids… you really needed me, ‘cos you were having a hard time with the separation and your dad being gone. If I’d had that baby, I dunno when we’d have gotten divorced, if I would have ever gotten together with Liam, or your dad with Harry. It would’ve been… just a terrible mistake. It would’ve kept a dying marriage on life support.”

“God… Dad…”

“And I was conflicted about it, a bit, but only ‘cos I was married to your father and already had two kids with him, who I obviously adored. And he was in rehab, so I couldn’t have a proper talk with him about it, which I really wanted to do. And in the end I just had to make the decision myself, and I did what I had to. Look, I loved you and your sister when you were just tiny little tadpoles inside me, I promise I did,” Louis says. “As hard and inconvenient as it was, as many fears and doubts as I had, in the end I _wanted_ you. I wanted you both. I didn’t feel that way about that baby. So just understand, Amir, that it isn’t your fault. This isn’t a baby you’re meant to have.”

Amir is quiet for a moment. “I had no idea that any of that happened,” he says.

“I know. But I think you’re old enough to hear it, now.”

Amir’s so numb from the coke comedown that it takes a moment to realize, but he’s relieved. He’s massively relieved. He didn’t know it, but he’s been waiting to hear this his entire life: proof that he was really wanted, a genuine choice his dad made, instead of a responsibility he forced himself into because he couldn’t stomach getting an abortion.

“I always thought you were against having abortions,” he says. “For yourself, I mean. I just thought it wasn’t something you’d do.”

“Oh, nah, no,” Louis says. “For you two… look, considering what you’re goin’ through right now, I won’t lie to you. I considered it as an option both times. Mostly ‘cos everyone was pressuring me to ‘ave one, with your sister — I was fucking up this massive world tour by having a baby. But even despite that, like, right after I found out about her, I was already wonderin’ how I could go about keeping her.” He clears his throat, sounding verklempt. “And then with you, I knew no one but me and your dad would’ve thought it was a good idea. Only people I even told I was pregnant at first were him and my mum. I mean, we were these young and dumb fuckups, everyone thought, and no one thought I’d manage to have much of a solo career to begin with, much less so with two kids. And I knew all that. But both times, I just knew in me heart what I had to do. I didn’t want to be, like, angry and full of regret the rest of me life that I let the industry bully me into making a choice I didn’t want to make.”

“You think you would’ve regretted it?” It. Aborting me. ‘ _It._ ’

“I knew I would’ve,” Louis says. “I _knew._ Promise.”

Amir nods, relief continuing to wash over him. It’s a good feeling.

“And it wasn’t just selfish, I promise, ‘cos I did think I’d be a good dad. Even with all the not-great circumstances. If I could get me shit together, I thought I’d be good. Was one of the few things I felt so sure about.”

“You are a good dad,” Amir says softly.

“Thank you, love.”

“You should tell Mia about this,” Amir says. “Seriously. I think she’d want — I think she’d like to know.”

“Know what,” Louis says, sounding amused, “I’ve got a feeling you needed to hear it a bit more than her.”

“Yeah,” Amir admits, and they both laugh. “Dad? I miss you.”

“Oh, I miss you too, kiddo. Y’know, I really miss listening to you play the piano in the afternoons.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I think about that nearly every day.”

This strikes Amir as sad.

“Speakin’ of Mims, have you told her you’re pregnant?” Louis says.

“Oh. No.”

“Really? You tell her everything.”

Amir plays with his rings. “I know. I just didn’t think she’d get it. I knew you would.”

“Ah, okay.”

“Have you seen her lately?”

“Last week, yeah,” Louis says, sounding melancholy. “Still strange, her not being right down the road anymore.”

Amir doesn’t want to make him sad, so he says, “How’s Liam and the boys and everybody?”

“They’re great!” Louis says, instantly cheerful again. “The boys are finally starting to like their new school, actually. They don’t mind the uniforms as much anymore.”

“They’re pretty dorky uniforms.”

“I know, but at least when everyone’s wearing them, no one stands out as a dork.”

“True.”

“Liam’s good, too. He’s been down in L.A. a lot ‘cos he was wrapping up this project with Normani and Calvin.”

“Your Calvin?”

“No, love, Harris. But he’s done, now, so that’s why I’ve sort of got underway with me own album. He’s been writing with me a lot, but I’ve got him on twins duty too. And he’s been working on his garden, getting his greenhouse finished, all that.”

“How’s your dog?”

Louis and Liam had gotten a field spaniel as a surprise for the boys at Christmas and let them name him; they picked Goose.

“Dog is great,” Louis says. “Settling in nicely.”

“Still sensitive?” Amir just wants to keep hearing Louis’ voice, keep him talking.

“Oh, aye. If anyone raises their voice with him he goes and curls up in the corner like you’ve murdered him. Zayn told him to get off the couch last time he was here, he ended up hiding underneath me chair. Not quite what I expected, but we love him anyway, of course.”

“How much do you actually see Dad, anymore?” Amir murmurs, leaning back against the wall again, wiping his eyes.

“Hmm. I sometimes see him when I go to L.A. on business, and ‘round once a month, we all get together? It’s not far by train… actually faster than flying, and less of a hassle. Going along the coast is pretty. I mean, you know, they’ve brought the girls up to the ranch a few times.”

“Right, they wanted to meet Liam’s horse.”

“Yeah, you know wee girls and horses. But they still haven’t got near it, of course, ‘cos the thing is terrified of everyone but Sunday. Actually Patrick’s been trying to bribe it with carrots, but no go. And Payno still thinks he’s gonna ride it in a music video or summat. Like, good luck.”

Amir grins. “So it doesn’t like you either?”

“Oh, fuck no! I haven’t even tried, I’m dead afraid of it. Sunday’s like some horse wizard, honestly. Every time she visits she just comes to the fence and clucks at it, and it trots right up to her. I try to feed it horse cookies out the palm of me hand and it freaks the fuck out.”

“I think Sunday’s secretly half-horse.”

“Reckon she might be. Poor Liam, he bought the thing to bond with her over and it barely even likes him. We might have to just get another one and start from scratch wiv it.”

Amir actually suspects a big reason they moved to a ranch was to lure Sunday back home, because they now have a place for her to stick her horse. “You have the land, now.”

“We do! We do. But speaking of Zayn, he’s funny, he’s all jealous ‘cos he’d like some acreage. I mean, they’ve got a few properties, and all that backyard and beach in Malibu, but real estate’s on a premium there. Bit crowded. I think their closest neighbors have been big-time renovating lately, so that’s pissing him off. But Harry’s never gonna agree to move to the sticks the way we did. He always wants to be ten minutes from a major airport.”

Amir nods, comforted. He can always count on Louis to rattle off some lighthearted gossip that reminds him he’s part of a family, and just a plane ride away from a bunch of people that love him. His head hurts worse now from all the crying, but it’s a bearable sort of hurt.

“We should get like a Kennedy compound type thing,” he says. “For summers… a big piece of land on the ocean, and everyone can have their own house. And we can meet up and all go the beach together.”

“You feeling a bit homesick?” Louis says, in that maternally insightful way he has. “I’m gonna have to beg you not to make me live a hundred feet away from your dad and Harry for an entire summer.”

“Daaaad…”

“Sorry, but no matter how good of terms you’re on, there are just some things you never want to do with your ex-husband.”

“You went on tour with them!” Amir exclaims. “And that was for a whole summer too!”

“I made several million dollars doing that, and even then we barely survived,” Louis jokes. “I punched Harry in the face, you might recall. So imagine all that, but it’s happening at a barbecue, and you and all the other kids are in tears. Still sound fun?”

“You and Harry have gotten on better lately,” Amir says stubbornly. He knows his parents will never get back together, but the best-case alternative is the dads and stepdads all being harmoniously pals.

“We have,” Louis agrees. “We’ve actually been texting a lot, even. Haven’t done that with him since… God. Since we were like twenty. So, yeah, you’re right about that.”

“Good.”

“Listen, kiddo, I really do have to go here, I’m sorry. One of the bands I manage is having a bit of a legal crisis, copyright thing, I was looking for some files when you called —”

“Jesus, Dad! Why did you let me talk to you for like a half hour?”

“‘Cos you’re me pregnant nineteen-year-old son who called me and started cryin’ hysterically,” Louis says drily. “But you’re alright now, yeah?”

“I’m fine! Go! I’m hanging up on you. God. Bye.”

Amir does hang up and sits there, realizing for the first time how cold he is and how the slats in the plastic crate are digging painfully into his bony ass.

It occurs to him how many people around him have had an abortion, or almost did, and he never knew. He wonders about Evan’s sister’s — was she scared? Or sad? Cavalier? Grimly resigned? Rachel seems pretty game and businesslike most of the time, but she does have a soft side. Evan brought Amir along with him to her engagement dinner in December, and she cried at a few of the toasts.

Oh shit. Evan. He’s probably going out of his mind. Amir jumps to his feet and heads for the front of his building.

*

Evan going out of his mind: confirmed. He’s on the phone with what must be campus police when Amir walks into the apartment.

“Black hair, brown eyes... I dunno, like five seven?” he’s saying. When he hears the door close, his head jerks up, and he heaves a sigh of relief. “Wait, never mind, sorry. He just walked back in. Yeah, cancel it. Sorry. Bye.” He taps his watch, then spreads his arms at Amir. “What the fuck, man?”

“I barely went anywhere!” Amir exclaims, shrugging his coat off.

Jordan peeks out of his bedroom door. “Oh, so you’re _not_ missing?” he says.

“Do I look missing? By the way, I’m five eight.”

“Short king,” says Jordan, who’s barely taller, and Amir snorts.

“Who cares?” Evan says, sounding more angry than he ever does. “And can you stop like, rolling your eyes at me? I hate that.”

Amir rounds on him, incredulous. “Then don’t make that dumb fucking face at me!”

“What _dumb face_?”

Jordan’s eyebrows shoot up, and he quickly ducks back into his bedroom.

“I’m tired of this,” Evan says tightly.

Fear prickles at Amir’s heart. “Tired of what?”

“You pushing me away!”

“I’m not!”

“What did I do wrong, earlier?” Evan says. “I just asked if you were okay, and you went off on me.”

“Why are you assuming I’m not okay?”

“I can tell you’re not!”

“Stop treating me like anything’s different!” Amir hisses, so his roommates don’t overhear.

“But something is, though!”

Amir is too tired to fight anymore, and anyway, he’s feeling more grown-up than usual right now. He sits down on the futon and pats the spot next to him. “C’mere,” he says, somewhat hoarsely.

Evan still looks pissed, but he comes over and sits next to Amir. Amir rests his head against Evan’s shoulder. He feels a stabbing nerve pain in his hand, which he balls tightly into a fist until the pain goes away. That happens to him, sometimes — it’s a piano thing. He plans to ignore it until he can’t anymore.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” Amir says. “I just needed some fresh air, I was in the alley the whole time. Literally fifty feet away.”

Evan laughs. “Cool, I feel really dumb, then.”

“Did you actually call the cops? You’re such a white person.”

“Amir, I said ‘If you don’t text me you’re okay in the next ten minutes, I’m calling campus police,’ and you never answered.”

“Oh, shit.” Amir glances down at his watch. “I missed that one, sorry. But I was _barely_ gone.”

“I didn’t mean to freak out,” Evan says. “I just felt like you left in a bad way, I didn’t want you to go do something stupid.”

“Like what?”

He hesitates. “I dunno. Walk into traffic?”

“ _Evan_!”

“What? I was worried, okay?”

“I’m a little more stable than that _,”_ Amir says, offended.

“I don’t think you’re unstable,” Evan quickly says. “Just sensitive.”

“I’m — fuck you, I’m an _artist_ , so —“

“I didn’t say it was a bad thing!”

Amir doesn’t say anything. Evan pets his hair as if to apologize.

“It’s just I know you have a hard time with comedowns,” he says. “I know they make you really depressed, sometimes. I couldn’t tell if that was what was going on.”

Amir remains quiet, further annoyed by the fact that this is entirely fair and accurate. Having drugs sap him of his dopamine stores sometimes tosses him into a depressive funk for up to a week after. But a couple bumps of shitty coke isn’t going to do that to him. Evan’s just being overprotective.

“I’ve just had a really weird day,” Amir finally says.

“Yeah. Me too.”

“Can you get that I’m feeling, like…” He struggles to articulate it. “I just want you to be nice to me, right now. You of all people. Like, I don’t think that’s so hard to grasp.”

“No, I know. I get that.”

Amir nestled into him more comfortably, resting his head against Evan’s chest. Evan strokes his hair some more, ruffling it and dragging his fingers through it so it stands on end.

“You know, you’re the only person I let fuck up my hair like that,” Amir mutters.

Evan presses a kiss to his head. “I’m not fucking it up, I’m styling it.”

“It’s short right now, you make it literally stand straight up.”

“It looks good that way. Don’t worry about it.”

Amir plays with a button on his flannel shirt. “Want to smoke some weed?”

“Definitely,” Evan says immediately. “Definitely definitely.”

Amir grabs the grinder and starts twisting it. They fall quiet, cuddling close to each other. The feeling of being small and scared returns. Amir can smell alcohol on Evan’s breath.

“Why’d you avoid me this morning?” he says.

“I didn’t,” Evan says.

“Yeah, you did.”

“I don’t see it that way.”

“I do,” Amir says.

Evan sighs. “Well, maybe I just needed some space,” he says.

“From what? From me?”

“No, from this shit that we’re going through.”

“You’re not going through anything,” he says. “I am.”

Evan’s face changes. “You really think I’m not going through anything?”

“What’re you going through?”

Evan says nothing, just looks down, his eyes averted.

“Tell me,” Amir urges.

Evan shakes his head. “When it’s all over,” he says.

“When what’s all over?”

“When…” He gestures. “ _This_ , okay? Then we can talk. It’s just too weird right now.”

Amir stares at him in curiosity, and Evan blows out another, harder sigh, then shakes his head.

“Let’s smoke some weed,” he says. He puts the TV on, and Amir leans forward to grab the joint papers off of the coffee table.

*

Amir has a fire nightmare that night. He hasn’t had one in a while now, so he’s probably overdue.

It’s a worse one than usual. In it, he flies out to Sacramento, and when he gets to the airport, Louis and Liam aren’t answering their phones. He takes a rental car out to the ranch, and when he gets there, it’s burned down entirely. Nothing left but ashes on the ground.

Amir jerks awake, shaking. It takes a moment to remember that everything is fine.

He checks his phone. 3 a.m. Louis is probably still awake in California. He texts him _hi._

 _Hi! i’m fine! go back to sleep!_ , Louis texts back.

This isn’t the first time Amir has done this, more like the tenth, but the sense of relief is the same every time.

Zayn’s guaranteed to be awake — he rarely gets to bed earlier than two. _hi_

 _hi beta,_ Zayn says a moment later. _whats up_

_nothing. had a bad dream_

_ahhh ok. It’s not real_

_i know_

_:)_ , Zayn says.

 _if there’s another wildfire in malibu will you guys be safe?_ Amir says.

_Yes. i promise. let me be the one to worry about that._

_okay,_ Amir writes back sleepily.

Next to him, Evan shifts in the sheets and groans. “Mmmf.”

Amir flicks his watch off so there’s no longer blue light disturbing the darkness, but Evan says, “You up?”

“Yeah, sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Nightmare?” Evan says intuitively.

“Just a little one.” Amir rolls closer to him in the darkness, kicking the blankets up off his feet so they’re not as hot.

“Fire?”

“Yeah.” Amir settles against his chest, burying his face in Evan’s neck. Evan starts to stroke his hair and rub his scalp again. It feels good, even though Amir gets twitchy about Evan rubbing finger oils into his hair and greasing it up. Whatever, he’ll shower in the morning.

“I haven’t had one about fire for a while,” Evan says. “But sometimes I have this one where I’m trapped in an elevator, and it’s kind of the same thing. Like, claustrophobic.”

Amir doesn’t say anything, but squeezes the thin fabric of Evan’s t-shirt in his hand, his knuckles pressing into the warm chest underneath.

“How was talking to Henry?” he murmurs.

“Didn’t get to,” Evan says, his voice going low and restrained. “He was heading into class when Rach called him.”

“Is he even gonna be at her wedding?”

“Yeah, yeah. We expected him to skip all the engagement stuff.”

Amir barely knows Henry, who never got along with Evan when they were kids and then willingly went off to boarding school at twelve and stayed all six years. When he came home on breaks, he and his other shitty little friends used to do stuff like kill frogs and play mean pranks on their housekeepers.

“Sucks that he is the way he is,” Amir says.

Evan nods. “Feel like it’s my fault, maybe,” he says. “I was never that great an older brother. Never really hung out with him, or was like, a role model… I dunno.”

“Yeah.”

“I always feel weird I’m more close with Rachel than I am with him, ‘cos there’s way less of an age difference, and we’re guys. But we just never… I dunno.”

“I don’t think it was your fault,” Amir says. “I think he’s just kind of a shitty person.”

“Yeah, well,” Evan says sourly. “Not everyone has a great, tight family like you.”

“My family’s more fucked up than you think.”

“Please. No. Your family’s just like, dramatic, that’s all. It’s nothing like ours.”

“I get that,” Amir says — gently, because Evan sounds like he’s actually hurting. “But you’re basically family to us at this point… no matter what happens with your actual family, you have us, I promise.”

“What if you and me break up again?”

“Evan…” Amir pulls back, and settles on the pillow next to him.

Evan shrugs. “What, I’m gonna have you guys then? I just don’t want to put my heart into that and like, believe I have that support system there if it’s not a sure thing. I can’t do that to myself.”

“Okay, first, yeah, unless you end up murdering me, you can literally always rely on Louis, ‘cos that’s just how he is with people,” Amir says. “Second, we’re not going to break up. Why would we?”

Evan’s quiet for a long moment. “Honestly?” he says. “I was kind of afraid you might want to break up about me getting you pregnant.”

“ _What?_ ”

“Just ‘cos you’re really serious about your future,” Evan rushes to add. “And this is like, serious stuff, this could have fucked that up. I mean, we’ve been serious lately, I wasn’t sure how you were feeling about that.”

“Dude…” Amir starts laughing. “That’s crazy. I feel like _I’m_ always the one pushing us to be serious.”

“I mean, maybe, yeah, but it’s just ‘cos I get scared.”

“Me too! It’s scary! I got scared about you crashing with me here, but now I can’t imagine not having you around this much, so like…”

“Look, I’m never not gonna be afraid I’m holding you back,” Evan says. “Sorry. That’s just how it is.”

“No, stop that. Seriously. I don’t even _get_ that _,_ like — what are you gonna do to hold me back?”

“I dunno,” Evan says. “Like what if I stop taking anything from my parents? We’re gonna be in seriously different money situations.”

“We’ll figure it out!”

“I’m already basically living in your apartment rent-free.”

“‘Cos I want you to! ‘Cos I love you and I wanna hang out with you!”

“But expand that out to like three years from now. What if you’re on tour or whatever, and I can’t even pay for a flight out to see you?”

“I’ll pay for your stupid flight!”

“I just don’t want you to compromise,” Evan says. Amir can’t see his expressions well in the dark, but he hears how serious he is. “Don’t give up any opportunities for me. I don’t want you to resent me. I’d rather we like, break up for a while and get back together older, than have you resent me.”

“I don’t want that,” Amir cries. “I hated being broken up. I don’t like being without you, I don’t even like it when you don’t sleep here. And you already want to run away to the woods all the time.”

Evan laughs. “Y’know, you can come with me this summer.”

“I can’t stay up there... I’ll have my band, plus jazz orchestra.”

“That’s chill, just come on days you have off.”

“Come stay in the woods with you?”

“Yeah!” Evan jostles his arm a little. “The woods are good for your soul. I swear.”

“I know.”

“So come. You can’t work all the time, you need breaks.”

It does sound nice, actually. He pictures himself on the porch of a cabin deep in the lush forest, playing the guitar while Evan’s catching fish in the creek. Maybe he could write some music; he hasn’t had time to compose any of his own stuff lately.

“Okay,” Amir agrees. He hesitates, then says, “Since we’re up… do you wanna have sex?”

Evan wraps an arm around his waist, squeezing his shirt in his hand. “Do you?”

“Not really,” he admits.

“Then it’s cool, we won’t.”

“Do _you_ not want to, or do you not want to ‘cos I don’t want to?”

“Amir…”

“I’m asking!”

“‘Cos you don’t want to.” Evan reaches past him to grab a bottle of water off the bedside table, and swallows a sip. “Duh. Come on.”

“I mean, I want to,” Amir says. “I just feel weird, I dunno.”

Evan caps the water and lazily tosses it aside; Amir scowls as he hears it land and roll across the floor. He hates stuff being on his floor. Evan makes up for it, though, by wrapping his arms around him and squeezing him into a tight cuddle.

“It’s fine,” Evan murmurs.

“Okay.” Amir feels a lurch of anxiety. “Are we okay?”

“We’re okay, I swear. We’re gonna be fine.”

“Yeah,” Amir says pitifully.

Evan leans in, nosing at his scalp. “Your hair smells good.”

“It’s my gel… it has orange in it.”

“Nice, I like orange.”

“I know, duh. That’s why I got it.”

“Oh, slick.” Evan sniffs him again.

“I can’t believe you thought I was going to dump you ‘cos of this,” Amir says. “I thought you were gonna dump _me_ ‘cos of this.”

“ _What_? Why?”

“‘Cos of the same stuff you said. I thought you were gonna get spooked.” Amir rests his cheek on Evan’s ropey bicep.

“Why would I get spooked?”

“You haven’t really even gotten to date around at all, and this shit is so heavy.”

“I don’t wanna date around,” Evan murmurs. “You’re the only person I’ve ever really wanted to seriously be with.”

“Yeah?”

“Look, I did that same kid shit in high school that everybody did, like having girlfriends you went to The Commons with and kissed in the hallway, or whatever. It was goofy.”

Amir remembers Evan having girlfriends. Though he isn’t aware of having had any feelings for Evan at the time, he does distinctly remember getting possessive of him over it. He just found every single one of the girlfriends annoying, because they hung all over Evan and took up the free time that Amir felt he should be spending talking to him about video games and planning that weekend’s escapades.

“ _I_ didn’t do that,” he says.

“You never liked girls enough to date one,” Evan says. “And it’s not like girls weren’t trying. Every girl we were friends with was trying. Plus, you were always ahead of me, y’know? Like I said, that was kid stuff. I was doing that shit, and you were, like, losing your virginity to a college guy. Soon as we started high school, you were doing seven minutes in Heaven and stuff, way before me and Jason had kissed anybody.”

“‘Cos whenever we went to a party I had people handing me drinks and then dragging me away to do that shit.”

“Yeah, I know it’s very hard for you that you’re good-looking,” Evan says, laughing.

Amir pinches him. “Like you’re ugly.”

“People just react to you different, Meer. You know it’s true.”

“You dated while we were broken up, too,” Amir points out.

“A little.”

“Well, you barely talk about it.”

“‘Cos I had the one actual relationship. Amanda Carlson from Latin, right after I got out of the woods.”

“Yeah, you told me,” Amir says. “Well, at first you kept saying you dated _some girl_ , and I had to pull it out of you when you were drunk…”

“It’s just embarrassing, is all.”

“Why? She’s cute, and nice.”

“No, not her.” Evan strokes his hair. “Just how dumb I was about it, I felt so awkward and boring around her. Honestly, I was relieved when she dumped me.”

Amir smiles to himself.

“And, uh, really no one else. I met a couple people off apps. Guys who kind of looked like you… but nobody really came close, y’know.”

Amir’s face gets hot, and the smile gets bigger.

“And you had trombone boy,” Evan says.

“Yeah, I had trombone boy.”

“Only guy you dated, right?”

“You already know I fucked, like, fifteen guys besides Sam.”

He was really self-destructive about it, too. Terrible, frantic sex in public bathrooms, party hookups on strangers’ dirty bedroom floors. Whatever it took to get him out of his own head.

“I said _dated_ ,” Evan says. “I like to pretend the rest of that didn’t happen.”

“I was lonely, I wanted attention.”

“Apparently.”

Amir wriggles in his arms to get his hand loose, then reaches up to pinch him on the nipple. Evan laughs some more.

“None of them actually cared about me, though,” Amir mutters. “Not even Sam. None of them would’ve, like, loved me. Nobody loves me like you do.”

Evan strokes his hair.

“Everyone just wants something from me,” he says.

“Not everyone.”

“Yeah. Everyone except you.”

“Amir…”

“It’s okay. Just promise me if we ever do break up, we’ll still be best friends, right?”

“We would,” Evan whispers. “We would.”

“Okay.”

Amir settles back down against him, his head on Evan’s chest. Evan strokes his hair, gently and methodically, like a metronome.

“I want stuff from you,” he murmurs to Amir. “I’m not a saint.”

“You love me, though. It’s real.”

“It’s real,” Evan agrees.

MANHATTAN, FEBRUARY 12, 2037

The rest of the week starts going by more normally. Amir wakes up early Thursday, takes half of an Adderall and finishes his Fats Domino paper inside of an hour so he can hand in a hard copy right at 11:30. That night, he surprises Evan by dragging him to the trampoline park at the midtown Dave and Buster’s, and they jump around like idiots for an hour. Then Amir gets crashed into by a husky 12-year-old, has the wind knocked out of him and has to sit on the floor wheezing for a minute.

Evan tries not to look too worried, but Amir can tell he is. He doesn’t say anything though, thank God. Amir wants so badly to pretend everything is normal right up until the appointment, and then go back to normal for real afterward.

They get pizza after, since he’s feeling nauseous again and that’s usually the one thing he can tolerate when he doesn’t want to eat. They order a whole pie that Amir picks at while Evan eats slice after slice and hands him his crusts.

“I thought you liked crusts,” Amir says after he’s done this a third time.

“I do, but they’re the only part you’re eating,” Evan says.

Amir nods and wrinkles his nose. “I think the sauce has too much oregano or something.”

Evan, who’s practically inhaled every slice he’s eaten, just looks at the pizza bemusedly. “You want a calzone?”

Amir dry heaves at the thought. “No.”

Despite feeling like crap, he still doesn’t really feel pregnant. Maybe he’s in denial. Sometimes he does feel a weird pressure in his abdomen like he drank too much water or something, but it comes and goes.

There’s a toddler a few booths ahead of them, leaning on a guy’s shoulder and facing Amir, staring at him. He has big, dark, hooded eyes like Patrick, and hair the color of honey. Quiet, calm, just staring and staring.

Amir stares back at him, drifting into a reverie. Would their baby, someday, look like that? Would it be light like Evan, or olive like him? Would it have Evan’s eyes, a desaturated greenish blue?

Would it like music?

Would it like _him_? Would he be a good dad? How many years will he have to wait to make sure he’s outgrown being childish and selfish first, to make sure he doesn’t fuck up his kid or break their family?

“You okay?” Evan says, studying his face.

Amir blows out a breath. “Yeah.”

His watch vibrates on his wrist, and he glances down. He must have activated the boys’ weird twin telepathy by thinking about Patrick, because Max just texted him _Hi_.

 _hi maximum fox,_ Amir types back. _what’s up_

_nothing, just saying hi_

_okay. how’s school going?_

_Great_ , Max says.

_how’s the dog_

_He’s great. i taught him how to play dead and a bunch of other stuff_

He forgot what talking to Max is like: everything’s great! Life is a party! Amir would find it a little annoying, if he didn’t love him so much.

 _is julyard good?_ Max says.

Amir laughs aloud at the butchered spelling. _Juilliard is really good._

 _dad said later this spring we’re all going to come out and visit to see you play in the orcastra,_ Max writes, then quickly adds, _whoops i think that was a surprise_

_lol it’s okay, i won’t tell him you told me_

_:)_

Off a sudden hunch, Amir says, _hey,_ _did he tell you to text me?_

_yeah. he said you were homesick_

Amir sighs. _okay. thanks buddy_

_no prob! feel better!_

*

Late Friday afternoon, he’s goofing around with a few of his piano friends in a concert hall on the fifth floor, “practicing” by writing a ragtime musical about a disastrous party they all went to last Saturday (with numbers like _Tony Broke My Fucking Table_ and _Running Down Broadway With The Keg)_ when an email from the professor for his Monday morning jazz theory class pops up on the screen of his watch.

_Amir, I’m sorry, but I can’t excuse an absence for a doctor’s appointment without a doctor’s note._

His hands pause on the keys as he reads this, his blood running cold. He gets up from behind the baby grand, then, slinging his backpack onto his shoulder.

Julie looks up from her keyboard. “Where you going?”

“I’ll be back,” he says. “I need to talk to Barrett about something.”

He gets booed by a couple people and gives them the finger in response, grinning. “I’ll be back!”

“Nah, you’re done,” Marcus says, coming over and bumping him out of the way, taking a seat on the bench. “I’m running the show now, fuck out of here.”

“Wow,” Amir says. “Our production values just went out the window. This show’s gonna close opening night.”

Marcus gives him the finger back.

Professor Barrett is a floor below, so he takes the stairs, then stops at the bottom, disoriented. Juilliard's flat, white, super-modernist architecture is probably going to take another year to get acclimated to, if not right up until graduation. Plus, he’s been light-headed lately.

He’d tweeted about that this morning on his private account: _would be cool to not wake up and then immediately black out and fall over!_ A few of his friends liked this, probably thinking it’s a veiled reference to partying too hard, and Evan liked it either out of boyfriendly solidarity or boyfriendly guilt. Mia responded, _i thought you stopped fainting back in high school,_ and he replied to her, _i did,_ which she answered with a _??_

Amir will tell her. Eventually.

He finally gets himself going in the right direction (left) and finds the door labeled FACULTY that leads to the jazz department offices. A few doors are open, and he sees Professor Thomas at his desk grading papers. He waves at him; Thomas looks up, bleary-eyed, and waves back.

Barrett’s office door is closed. He notices she has a yellowed _Vote Gore!_ sticker on her whiteboard. Jesus, she must be ancient, like seventy. She doesn’t look that old, maybe because she dyes her hair a pinky red.

Amir knocks.

“Come in,” she calls.

He wipes his sweaty hands on his jeans and enters, shutting the door behind him.

“Oh, hello Amir,” she says, smiling. All his jazz professors like him, even though he’s kind of arrogant in class discussions sometimes. He’s got enough chops to back it up, plus he turns in thoughtful essays.

“Hi,” he says, and takes a seat.

Barrett looks at him over her glasses. “You were wanting to miss class on Monday, yes?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s going to be an important class. You have a checkup?”

“It’s more of a procedure,” Amir says. His anxiety is making him sweaty and jumpy; his leg keeps jiggling.

“Okay,” Barrett says. “Is there a reason you can’t get me a doctor’s note about that?”

“Isn’t that kind of a HIPAA violation?”

She smiles tightly at him. “I just need a note, Amir. It’s school policy, I’m sorry. You could take the unexcused absence, but it means five points off your grade at the end of the semester.”

That’s totally unacceptable. No. He’s pissed, now, because what is he supposed to say? She’ll know what’s going on when she gets the email, anyway, because what ‘procedure’ would he be getting from an OB-GYN at 10 a.m. on a Monday?

Still, Amir isn’t expecting himself to snap at her, “I’m getting an abortion. You really need a note about that?”

Barrett looks like she might fall out of her chair. “Um,” she manages. “I — I don’t need a note _about_ that, no…”

Amir feels terrible, suddenly. He didn’t mean to upset her, or be so candid. Now he worries if he says anything else he might cry. Fuck. He’s gotten behind on his homework this week, he’s barely paying attention in class, and now he’s bawling out his teachers. So much for golden boy, gold star student Amir.

She’s looking at him with concern. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he chokes out. “Sorry. I just didn’t want to lose the points.”

Barrett softens. “I know,” she says. “You’re very diligent. You can understand, though, that I get a lot of made-up excuses.”

“Even at Juilliard?” he says hoarsely.

“Oh, yeah. Even here. And it’s so much more important for the students here to _not_ miss class. I mean, you’re receiving a one-of-a-kind education.”

“Yeah. I do know that. It’s not like I ever skip, or anything.”

“I know,” she says. “You’re a good student. That’s why I’m so surprised to hear you address me as disrespectfully as you just did. That’s not like you at all.”

Amir stares at the floor, getting choked up. It’s a relief to know that she doesn’t think he’s a bad kid, in spite of all this. “Sorry.”

Barrett tilts her head at him. “Do you need anything?” she says. “You can talk to me, if you need to.”

“I’m fine.”

“This is a very high-pressure environment, I know. If you need to talk, or see a counselor —“

“I’m fine,” he interrupts, more forcefully. God, everything about this is humiliating. She’s talking to him like he’s a stupid pregnant teenager. Because he is a stupid pregnant teenager. He just wants to bolt. “I promise.”

He probably should see a counselor. He did for a few months after the car accident, and then he saw her again for a couple sessions after the wildfires, because Louis thought they were all traumatized. (Mia had been seeing one on and off for years anyway, and Sunday dryly refused, point-blank. Evan probably would probably break down from about 20 years worth of shit at once if someone made him go to therapy.) Amir didn’t really want to talk, his second time around — his therapist asked him, “So how do you feel about your childhood home burning down?” and it was still so fresh that he just shrugged and said, “Bad.” “How do you feel about facing down your own mortality the way you did?” “... Bad.”

“Okay,” Barrett says, her voice still gentle. “Make sure you get the notes. We’re covering a lot of complex ideas, next class. It’ll be hard to catch up.”

Whatever. He always catches up. Amir nods hard and quickly gets to his feet, backing away. “Got it,” he says. “See you next week.”

“Amir?” she says, putting a hand up as if to stop him. “I just want to tell you… at a school of incredibly talented young people, your natural aptitude for jazz stands out to me. I think your mind is special, and I’m not the only professor who feels that way. We’ve been discussing appointing you as a student advisor next semester. So please do take care of yourself? I want to see you become the musician I know you can be.”

Amir wants to say to her the same thing he’s wanted to say, over and over again, to nearly every authority figure who’s ever talked sternly to him about his potential: what’s the point of being gifted if it’s so fucking hard for him to just live his life?

He thinks on some level it might be nice to be totally unremarkable — free from the pressure, free from the agonizing drumbeat of his own brain, free from the crunched and jangled nerves and the constant irritation with everyone around him, free from being told he has an existential duty to the world just because he happened to be born left-brain smart with long fingers.

Amir manages a thank you before fleeing her office. He doesn’t return to his friends in the concert hall. He wants to go walk around outside, so his shame and confusion and relief can sweat out of his pores and float away up into the steely winter sky.

*

On Sunday, Evan accompanies his grandma to a high society tea on the Upper East Side in hopes of squeezing some money out of her — when Mamie’s grandkids act as her escorts, she sometimes hands them a crisp hundred or two from her pocketbook in exchange. She likes to show them all off to her high society pals, even black sheep Evan, because most of her friends’ grandkids are in rehab or estranged from them.

Amir comes to pick him up from her penthouse around three so they can go to a movie. He lingers in the foyer awkwardly as a wizened old butler stands off to the side, presumably there to make sure he doesn’t steal anything.

Amir knows he’s rich, but these people are grossly so. The penthouse is draped with heavy curtains, tapestries, and Chagalls, and the floors gleam like they’re waxed on a daily basis.

Finally Mamie comes around the corner with Evan, who’s dressed like a dork in a button-down and slacks. Amir mouths _nice outfit_ at him, and he makes a lightning-quick jerking off gesture in response.

“Hello, Amir,” Mamie says, smiling. “Always a pleasure.”

“Same to you, Mrs. Stewart,” Amir says, smiling back at her.

Her eyes travel down his outfit — the leather jacket he stole from Zayn, vintage Megadeth t-shirt, skin-tight jeans with floral-patterned motorcycle boots — and her lips tighten. Oh, Mamie, if only you knew about what you can’t see, he thinks. I have your heir to the family name right here in my unmarried teen uterus. Except not really, because I’m yeeting the fuck out of it first thing Monday morning. Or, in the language of your people: as soon as Nasdaq re-opens.

“Ready to go, buddy?” he says to Evan. He always calls Evan _buddy_ or _pal_ or _friendo_ in front of his family now, because they still insist on referring to Amir as Evan’s _little friend_ despite knowing they’re dating _._ Which is offensive for the ‘little’ as much as for the ‘friend.’

“Oh, you two are going to a movie, aren’t you?” Mamie says, pulling her pocketbook out of her clutch. “Here, Evan. For popcorn...”

She hands him like four hundred dollars. For _popcorn_?

Amir wonders briefly if he’s going to use this to help fund the abortion, like Louis speculated he might. He can’t ask, of course, since it’ll make things incredibly awkward if he isn’t. But it is kind of suspicious that Evan arranged a particularly painful Mamie outing for the day before. He had to know she’d cough up big money.

“Thanks, Grandma,” Evan says, leaning in to kiss her cheek. “See you next week.”

“Yes, yes. Have fun, you two!” she calls, as they head for the elevator.

Amir waves over his shoulder at her. “Thank you!”

The butler escorts them down, so they can’t really talk freely — they just nudge each other’s shoulders and smirk the whole way down, until Amir whispers “for popcorn” and Evan loses their battle of wills by cracking up laughing.

MANHATTAN, FEBRUARY 14, 2037

The day itself dawns gray and gloomy. Amir remarks on this as they’re taking a self-driving Uber over to the doctor, rain pattering on the clear glass top of the car, and Evan points out it’s been gloomy for a lot of this year so far.

“You have no sense of drama,” Amir tells him, and he laughs.

He’s tired and a little crabby; he barely slept the night before. Surgery anxiety kept him tossing and turning. He tried not to wake Evan, but he knows he was impossible to sleep next to; Evan’s puffy eyes confirm this.

Traffic slows way down as they make their way across the park, until they’re at a dead stop, and Amir rolls down a window to yell out, “Can I please get to my abortion on time?”

“Meeeeer,” Evan exclaims, laughing. “Jesus. Come on.”

Amir rolls the window back up. “What are you worried about, dude? That we’re gonna get sent to the principal’s office?”

“I —“ Evan spreads his hands. “I don’t know. Maybe I just don’t find this that funny.”

“You should try to find everything funny. It makes life easier.”

“Well, I’m working on it.”

At the doctor’s office, there are no other patients, as promised. A nurse who isn’t Courtney takes him back down the hall before he even has a chance to sit down. She sticks him and Evan in the little all-white recovery room and gives Amir a tablet with paperwork on it along with a stylus. Then he gets a shot of Ativan in the arm, which he tries not to wince too hugely about.

“Did you already take the misoprostol?” the nurse says, dropping his sleeve back down.

“Yes ma’am,” Amir murmurs, without looking up from the tablet. “Two hours ago like you guys said.”

“Excellent!” she chirps. “Good job!”

Amir silently mocks her enthusiasm the second she leaves, then scrolls to the next page of paperwork.

___ I understand that my doctor is going to perform an abortion on me, which will end my pregnancy and will result in the death of the fetus._

___ I understand that I am not being forced to have this abortion and have the choice on whether to have this procedure._

___ I give my permission to this doctor and such other associates, technical assistants, and other health providers as the doctor thinks is needed to perform the abortion on me using the surgical and medical procedures checked above._

___ I have been given an opportunity to ask questions about my condition, alternative forms of treatment, risk of non-treatment, the procedures to be used, and the risks and hazards involved…_

It goes on and on like that.

Evan’s looking over at him, his brow knit. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” Amir murmurs, and checks all the boxes in one rapid sweep of his wrist, dragging the nubby point of the stylus downward.

*

Once he’s signed away his pregnancy, Amir’s taken into the surgical suite and given a gown to put on.

“Can I leave my boxers on?” he says to the nurse, who’s since introduced herself as Astrid. She looks at him with concern, like he’s a fucking idiot, and then he remembers what he’s there for. “Uh, never mind.” It’s just cold in this stupid room is all. He’s skinny, so he’s always cold, and he hates being cold. He’s a California boy at heart.

Astrid hooks him up to monitors and a blood pressure cuff. He tries not to look at any of the machinery surrounding him. It’s all creepily sterile and white, like dentistry tools; one thing even resembles a Sonicare toothbrush.

When he’s covered in sticky leads, begowned with his bare butt on the edge of the exam table, the doctor comes in with Evan and Courtney. He’s happy to see both of them, and smiles widely.

“Hi there,” the doctor says, extending his hand for Amir to shake. “I’m Dr. Pelphrey, but you can call me Max if you want to be a little less stiff.”

“Heyyyy, that’s my brother’s name,” Amir exclaims, then becomes aware of a slur in his voice.

“Is that the anxiety medicine?” Evan says, laughing. “‘Cos he never smiles like that.”

Pelphrey and Courtney both laugh too. “Yes,” Courtney says. “He’s going to be pretty relaxed.”

“Nice,” Evan says. “Can he get a few of those to go?”

Amir gives him the finger, and they all laugh some more. Underneath the fuzziness of the medication, he feels a prickle of real anger — he’s sitting here naked under his gown on an operating table, vulnerable, while his boyfriend and doctors have a chuckle about how he’s _difficult_. It’s not fair.

“So, boyfriend can’t stay,” Courtney says, “but he wanted to give you something.”

Evan was holding his hands behind his back, and at this, he spreads them. In one is a bouquet of roses, and in the other is a small stuffed bear holding a stuffed heart.

Amir’s anger fades. “Thanks,” he says, with a lump in his throat.

Evan comes over and presses a kiss to his forehead, handing him the bear. “I can’t leave the flowers, but they said you can have him.”

Amir nods. “You sure you can’t stay?”

Evan looks terribly guilty and pets Amir’s head. “She said doctors only.”

Another new person comes in the room, then, and she dims the overhead fluorescents. Suddenly the small room is glowing blue with the light from monitors and equipment. She takes a seat on a stool and moves it over to the computers, then starts typing. Courtney guides Evan away and escorts him to the hallway, and he waves at Amir as the door shuts on him.

“You’ll see him as soon as you’re done,” she promises Amir, coming over and squeezing his shoulder. He must look bereft. He feels bereft, underneath the imposed serenity from the medication. “It’ll be over super fast. You ready?”

Amir nods.

“Okay. Lie back. Jen here is your anesthesiologist, she’s going to put you under, okay?”

Amir lies back onto the pillow, hugging the bear to his chest. Courtney reaches down to hold his hand, and he squeezes hers, tears leaking from his eyes again.

“It’s okay,” she whispers kindly.

“I just hate going under,” he says.

Jen, who was coming over with her little cart of supplies, pauses. “We don’t have to put you out,” she says. “We can do conscious sedation. It’s not too late to change your mind about anything.”

Amir closes his eyes. “No. Do it.”

“Okay.”

There’s a prick of pain on the back of his left hand, and then the feel of tape being pressed against the skin. Someone puts a mask on his face, and he inhales the strange cool air.

“Vitals look good,” Astrid says softly. “Blood pressure’s a little high…”

“It was the same at his intake,” Courtney says.

“I get anxious,” Amir mumbles, but they can’t hear him.

“Courtney, hand me that, uh… yeah, there you go, thanks…”

The voices blur together, their words losing their meaning. He tries to hold onto the world, but he can’t.

“Count back from a hundred for me, Amir?” one of the voices says.

“Hundred,” he slurs. “Ninety-nine… ninety… nine...”

*

Amir isn’t aware of anything for a few minutes after he wakes up. He just knows he’s sitting upright, now, and he’s in pain. He’s so groggy that it hurts to open his eyes, so he just keeps them squeezed shut and groans unhappily every time the wall he’s leaning on moves and jostles him. After a while he starts to come to and realizes the wall is actually Evan.

“Hey,” Evan says to him, noticing he’s stirring.

Amir coughs dryly. His stomach hurts; it feels crampy and achy like he has the shits. Not a good feeling. Plus he hurts deep between his legs, an ache like when you get hit in the balls, but internal. “Juice?”

Evan puts a cup in his hand. He opens his eyes a slit to look at it, then lifts it to his mouth. Pomegranate juice! It’s never tasted so good before.

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” Evan says, and they both laugh.

“I feel like shit,” Amir says hoarsely. “How bad do I look?”

“You always look good,” Evan murmurs. “But you do look tired.”

“I _am_ tired.”

“You’re s’posed to be.”

He thinks about this for a second. “I’m not pregnant anymore,” he says.

“You’re not. It’s over.”

“You promise?”

Evan laughs. “I promise.”

Amir’s brain swims with confusion until one thought breaks through the surface. He takes another sip, spilling juice on himself; Evan’s hand comes up and steadies his. “What did they do with it?”

“Huh?”

“What they took out. Where’d they put it?”

“Amir,” Evan says queasily.

“No… I mean… where does it go?” His stomach throbs with a cramp, and he clutches at it, wincing.

“Amir, it’s okay. You don’t have to think about that.”

Amir is quiet for a moment, then uses the wisps of his remaining strength to yell “COURTNEY!” so loudly he gets dizzy from the effort.

Courtney runs into the white room, which is now spinning. “Is everything okay?”

“He’s fine,” Evan says quickly, holding Amir steady.

“What did you do with it?” Amir says to her.

Courtney comes over and squats down in front of him, studying his face. “It’s going to be disposed of as medical waste.”

The sentimental, irrational teenager in him, which he had managed to repress so far, is finally making an appearance. “What about after that? What happens?”

Courtney glances at Evan, which makes Amir momentarily furious. Don’t look at _him_ , the fuck?

“All of our medical waste is incinerated,” she says.

“Is that like being cremated?”

“Um… it’s functionally the same as cremation, sure.”

“Oh,” he says in relief. “You promise?”

He knows it goes against Islam, but he so badly wants the cleansing destruction of fire. He wants closure and finality.

Courtney smiles at him. “I promise.”

“So you don’t just throw it in a landfill?”

“No, we don’t.” Courtney searches his face. “Are you having any regrets right now?”

Amir shakes his head.

“It’s okay if you are. Sometimes people do feel conflicted after, even if they feel they ultimately did the right thing.”

“I don’t,” he says impatiently.

“Okay,” she says. “Let us know if you need anything else.”

When she’s gone, Amir has another stabbing pain. He digs his fingers into Evan’s arm, which Evan tolerates very graciously.

“Sorry,” Amir says. He feels a little less loopy now. “Did that sound crazy?”

Evan reaches up and strokes his hair. “No,” he says gently.

“You think I’m crazy,” Amir accuses.

“There are so many other reasons for me to think you’re crazy, that was nothing.”

Amir sniffs. “Where’s my bear?”

Evan hands it to him.

*

When Amir is mostly coherent and has wriggled gingerly back into his hoodie and sweatpants, Evan helps him over to the front office so he can settle up.

Amir leans on the counter, staring blearily at the bill in front of him, holding a pen with a plastic flower taped to the cap. He still has the teddy bear squished under his arm.

“My dad was gonna pay,” he says in a hoarse voice.

“Did he call?” the receptionist says, glancing down at her keypad and tapping away.

“Yeah, last night.”

“Oh, yes, I see it here. He left his billing information, you’re all set.”

“Wait,” Evan interrupts. He’s clutching the roses limply in his watch hand; they’re pointing down at the floor. “I wanted to pay.”

So Louis was right. He’s always fucking right about this stuff.

“It’s okay,” Amir says to him.

“With the private consultation, and after insurance, the total comes to one thousand and thirteen dollars,” the receptionist says.

The blood drains from Evan’s face. “How much, um… how much for _just_ the abortion?”

“Evan,” Amir whispers. “Let my dad pay.”

“No,” Evan says stubbornly. “I’m paying for that part.”

“The procedure itself cost five hundred and fifty dollars,” the receptionist offers. “If you want to split the total across two cards, I can scan your watch.”

“Um, I don’t have a card on it,” Evan says. “But I brought cash.”

“You brought five hundred dollars in cash with you?” Amir says.

“Six.” Evan grabs his wallet so he can start digging out crumpled bills from it and stuffing them through the circular hole in the glass.

“Evan,” Amir says, exasperated but touched. “Put it in your savings, man, don’t do this…”

“It’s fine. Most of it’s what my grandma gave me, anyway. Look, I’ll make more.”

“Evan…”

Evan kisses him to shut him up. This is very romantic and sweet, so, whatever. Amir’s just going to have to start sneaking twenties into his jeans pockets when he does laundry at the apartment.

*

They gave him heavy-duty painkillers, but Amir is still in pain on the drive home. He lies on Evan’s lap, his knees tucked to his chest, Evan stroking his hair. The self-driving Uber recites every turn instruction of the GPS aloud to them until Amir loses it and yells, “Shut UP!” After that there's blissful silence.

Amir calls Louis to tell him everything went okay; Louis sounds like he’s at a bar or something, and he’s shouting when he picks up.

“What the fuck, Dad,” Amir groans.

“What?” Louis yells. “I can barely hear you.”

“What are you yelling at? Is it St. Smithin’s Day or whatever?”

“ _Swithin’s_ — and no, lad! Football!”

Amir does quick mental math and realizes it’s around 9 a.m. in Los Angeles. “How is there football on this early on a Monday and people are actually watching it?”

“It’s England playing Brazil at Brazil! We’re at one of Saccy’s English pubs. It’s only a year out from the World Cup, love!”

“Only a _year_ out,” Amir mouths at Evan, who laughs.

“So what’s up? Liam’s here — Liam, say hullo.”

“Hullo-ooo Amir,” Liam calls. He sounds wearied. “Your dad’s drunk already, cheers. And guess who’s visiting? First two guesses don’t count, rhymes with Alvin and Bolly.”

That explains pretty much everything that’s going on here. “Dad,” Amir yells over the din. “I did the… I did the thing I was going to do.”

“OH!” Suddenly the phone is off speaker. A still-tipsy but much more serious Louis quietly says, “Did everything go alright? You feel okay?”

“I feel fine,” Amir lies. “It went fine. Um, Evan’s here, he’s taking care of me.”

“Hi,” Evan calls.

“Good, good! Hi Evan. You home, then?”

“Almost.”

“Text me when you’re home. And go straight to bed.”

“Okay.”

When he’s hung up, Evan says, “He texted me last night.”

“Who? My dad?”

“Yeah.” His tone is kind of flat.

“What’d he say?” Amir says.

“‘Be more careful with my son,’” Evan mutters, looking out the window.

“That’s not fair of him,” Amir says. “This wasn’t your fault.”

Evan shrugs. “He’s your dad, though. Like, I get it. Just made me feel like I’m still that high school idiot bringing you home after curfew.”

Amir recognizes the strain in his voice: he’s not pissed Louis reprimanded him, he’s sad that he disappointed him. Evan respects Louis a lot, maybe even more than he does his own dad. He must feel hurt.

The Uber pulls crisply to a stop outside his apartment building. Evan helps him up, since he’s still woozy, and they shuffle across the sidewalk together, then up into the tiny courtyard.

A familiar drunk is hanging out in one of the bushes near the front door, and he winks at Amir as they go by, slurring, “Little early in the day to be that fucked up, kid.”

“Speak for yourself, man,” Evan says back.

He salutes them. Amir snorts.

They take the elevator. Amir never uses it, since he lives on the second floor, but today he couldn’t be more grateful that it exists. In the upstairs hallway, he can smell that one of his neighbors is making curry. He leans on the wall next to his front door while Evan reaches over to slip his watch off his wrist and use it to swipe the keyless entry.

Greg is home, singing in the shower, but Jordan must be in class. Good. The fewer questions they ask, the better. He’s already been way too loose-lipped about this whole thing. And as much as he likes his roommates, there’s no way they’d understand this — they’re two betas who both only recently lost their virginity.

Evan helps him down the hall to his own room. The pain is starting to subside some, buried under hydrocodone, but Amir still feels queasy and worn out. He wants so badly to lie down that he falls onto the foot of his bed and crawls the rest of the way up to his pillows.

Evan hovers awkwardly by the door, sandwiched between Amir’s keyboard and his Eames desk chair. “You want water or anything?”

“No,” Amir says. “Come cuddle me.”

“Okay.” Evan slips his jacket off and sets it on the back of the chair, then comes over to the bed, undoing his shirt cuffs so he can roll his sleeves up. He pulls up the covers and slides into bed next to Amir, wrapping his arms around him. Amir laces his fingers in Evan’s warm, calloused ones.

Evan kisses him. “How’s your pain?”

“Like a five,” Amir murmurs. “I dunno. Maybe a six.”

“That bad?”

“I have a really low tolerance.”

“Oh, yeah,” Evan says. “I know.”

Amir pinches him in retaliation.

“What? I used to skateboard with you! I know exactly what you’re like. Every time you wiped out, you acted like somebody’d killed you. You were a squid.”

“Shut up. Is that really how you’re gonna talk to me, right now? Remember when we were in middle school and you fell off your board going like one mile an hour on flat pavement?”

“I’d just had a growth spurt!” Evan exclaims, laughing. “I was unsteady!”

“I was _unsteady_ ,” Amir mocks him in a dumb voice. “The _sun_ was in my eyes.”

“For real, though, how much pain are you supposed to be in? Is this normal?”

“I think it’s normal,” Amir says. “Courtney said discomfort and _maybe_ pain, but they always lie like that, you know? Like saying a shot is just going to feel like a pinch or whatever.”

“Just let me know,” Evan says. “If you’re like, bleeding or anything.”

Amir makes a face. “I mean, I’m supposed to bleed.”

“Oh shit.”

“No, it’s fine. It’s just gross.”

He’s kind of intentionally trying to freak Evan out, half out of petty resentment over the unevenness of this situation, and half out of a desire to push him until he cracks and begs for mercy. But, annoyingly, Evan has grown up a lot in the past couple years. It’s no longer as easy to fuck with him, like when they were kids and Amir would toss a lizard at him just to hear him scream.

“One time in the Nevadas,” Evan says, “I got bit in my hand by a squirrel —”

Amir cracks up. “You what?”

“It was hurt, I was trying to help it! Anyway, it bit me, and it must have gone deeper than I thought, ‘cos I cleaned it out but it got infected and started oozing. I wrapped it up in like fifty layers, but I could still feel it oozing under... pus, blood, dead tissue —”

“Augh! Shut uuup!”

“Yeah, one of the park rangers had to come give me a huge shot of penicillin in my ass cheek,” Evan says, laughing.

“You never told me about that,” Amir says.

“I don’t want you to worry about me in the woods.”

“I’m not worried about you getting bit to death by squirrels, but when a wild animal bites you, please go to a doctor. You can get fucking, like… rabies.”

“I know, I know. I was dumb. I’d just gotten there.”

“Hey, so… do the Catskills people need you for another interview?”

Amir is reluctant to admit it, but he doesn’t want Evan to leave again. Not now. He wants free and plentiful access to cuddles for the next few days.

Evan pets his hair. “Yeah. But not ‘til Thursday. They want me to meet the two senior counselors, and they’ve been on a kayaking trip for the past week.”

Relieved, Amir leans into Evan’s chest, exhaling softly. He’s feeling a head rush from the codeine combined with the lingering effects of the anesthetic. “Okay. So you’re in, then?”

“Pretty much.”

“They don’t care you have a criminal record?”

“Nah. It’s not like it’s a felony, or I’m a sex offender, or anything.”

Amir laughs. “No, I guess not.”

“They aren’t even gonna drug test me,” Evan says. “They’re all about forgiveness, and whatever. They think making mistakes in the past makes you better at connecting with kids who are struggling with stuff.”

“Plus they’ll think you’re cooler,” Amir says. “They won’t think you’re lame and capping when you tell them to stop being fuck-ups.”

Evan laughs. “Yeah, exactly. Hey, um.” He sounds shy suddenly. “I wanted to tell you something. It’s good, not bad.”

“Yeah?”

“I think in the fall I want to go back to school.”

Amir twists in Evan’s arms to look at him. He’s got his bottom lip tucked into his mouth, like he does when he’s apprehensive. “Whoa, really?”

“Yeah, um… SUNY has a really good forestry program. I could get my associate’s by doing one year of online classes, and then a year of ranger school in the Adirondacks. And that way you and me would graduate around the same time.”

He sounds like he’s already decided.

“Did you apply?” Amir says.

“Yeah,” Evan murmurs. “Over the weekend. After we talked about, like, what we talked about.”

“ _Inshallah_.” Amir crosses his fingers. “Kiss it,” he orders, offering them to Evan, who clasps Amir’s hand in his and kisses the fingers, laughing.

“I think that’s awesome,” Amir says. “I love that idea.”

“I mean, it’s not going back to school the way my dad wants. I don’t think he’d even give me the money, so.”

“You can still go. Scholarships? Financial aid?”

“Can millionaires get those?” Evan says skeptically. “It’s not like I’ve been totally cut off, financially.”

“Loans?” Amir says, then cannily adds, “Ranger school sounds like you’d actually be working, so you’d probably get a discount on your tuition, right?”

Evan splits his crossed fingers apart so he can hold Amir’s hand. “Maybe. I haven’t checked.”

“I’ll look into it.”

“Oh shit,” Evan says, laughing. “You taking over?”

“I am,” Amir says sleepily. “And if you don’t get in, I’m gonna send Mia up to Syracuse to kick everyone’s ass. Hand me my dab pen?”

Evan reaches over to grab it off the bedside table, then hands it to him. Amir takes a long hit before slumping against the pillows and exhaling vapor.

“I might go to sleep now,” he murmurs. The aches and pains are more distant now, distant enough that he can imagine drifting off.

“Okay,” Evan says.

Amir lets his heavy, hot eyelids fall shut. “Evan?”

“Yeah, babe.”

Evan must still be worried about him. They don’t really do pet names that much.

“I wanted to tell you something,” Amir mumbles.

Evan strokes his hair back off his forehead. “Yeah?”

“I just… um…” How to phrase this? It’s so hard. His thoughts are like taffy, and despite the codeine working to erode his inhibitions, he still feels self-conscious. “I feel like part of the reason I was freaked out about this is, ‘cos… I do want that stuff with you someday… like to get married and have a baby for real. I want that with you. I was literally afraid I might come over weird and try to have this baby anyway, ‘cos it was ours…”

Evan leans in and presses a kiss to his temple at his hairline, very hard. “Amir,” he says, sounding sad.

“Like, that part made me sad, I won’t lie. Not the baby, I’m so relieved we’re not gonna have a baby, but also like, at the same time, it was a piece of you… and I love you, so…”

“Amir...”

“It’s okay,” Amir slurs. “No, it’s okay, I swear. I want you to get your forestry degree. And I’m gonna finish school. Then we can do all that stuff someday, if you want. But only if we want to, not ‘cos we have to.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I want that too,” Evan whispers. “I want to marry you, someday, one hundred percent. I would’ve married you if you wanted to keep the baby.”

This is comforting and traumatic to comprehend, all at once. Getting married just like his parents did… being pregnant at his wedding. Continuing the cycle.

He’s glad to hear Evan say it, anyway, because he thinks he would have strangled him if he kept the baby and Evan didn’t at least propose.

Amir always thought he was too smart for all of this. Louis always told him he was. You’re too smart, he’d say. Don’t be like your old man, don’t continue the family tradition, make a whole life first and then you can add in the family bit.

As he gets older, he doesn’t know if he’s completely on board with that. At least, he doesn’t see himself waiting ‘til thirty-five. He’s seen how differently the twins were raised than him and Mia, and how differently Zayn acts with Marlena and Toni — he’s like a _grandpa_ to them, he’s so doting and relaxed about the whole thing. Amir wants to be friends with his kids, if he has them, he wants to smoke weed with them and talk frankly with them the way Louis does with him.

“You’d want to be a family and shit?” he asks Evan.

“Yeah, of course,” Evan says. “You know how I feel about that, you know I want a family.”

“With me?”

“With you, yeah.”

“Someday?”

“Someday, yeah. I mean, I’d like to be less of a dumb kid, first.”

“Me too.”

“I want to do it right, too,” Evan says. “I want to give my kids everything. All my time, all my… everything. I don’t want them to grow up like I did. I don’t want to send anyone to boarding school.”

“I know,” Amir says, gazing at him. “I know you want that.”

Evan falls quiet, pushing his hair back from his face.

“You really wanna marry me?” Amir asks him.

“Yeah! Not this second, but yeah. I mean, I don’t get why you want to marry _me_ …”

“Oh, don’t be self-deprecating, okay? It’s super annoying.”

Evan laughs. “Okay.”

Amir lazily pats him on the cheek. “‘Cos I honestly think you’re too good for me, sometimes.”

“What? How?”

“You’re really good to me… you understand me, and you take care of me, even when I’m acting crazy or I won’t talk to you…”

“You’re not that bad.”

“I’m kind of an asshole sometimes,” Amir admits.

“Me too, bro,” Evan says with a laugh. “Like all the time.”

“No… no, you’re so much more patient than me...”

“Yeah, but that’s okay.”

“And less complicated,” Amir says. His chest aches as he says it.

Down the hall, he hears the shower shut off. Greg is no longer singing; now he’s whistling.

“I’m not simple,” Evan protests.

“No… you’re just not like me.” Amir swallows and lets his heavy, hot eyelids flick open. His throat feels dry again. Hot tears are leaking down his cheeks before he even realizes he’s started to cry. “I feel too much shit, y’know? I’m so tired of feeling all this shit. I hate living in my brain sometimes. I’m so tired.”

“Amir, Amir. You just need some rest, okay?”

Amir feels blindly for Evan’s hand, which he’d dropped earlier. Evan laces their fingers together again and squeezes him hard.

“I know it like, probably doesn’t help to hear it right now,” Evan says, “but I think it’s good that you are the way you are, you know? I mean, it’s like you said. You’re an artist. Don’t hate your brain, your brain is really cool.”

“Thanks.”

“I mean it.”

“By the way, I got you something for Valentine’s Day,” Amir mumbles. “Look in my, um… on my desk, the white thing…”

Evan turns and reaches behind himself, picking up a slim white box. “Jewelry?”

“It’s not fruity, don’t worry.”

“I didn’t…” Evan laughs. “I didn’t even say anything.”

“It’s the way you said _jewelry_. Open it.”

Evan does and laces his fingers under what’s inside, lifting it. It’s a thin leather bracelet with a silver tag that reads AWTM. He grins. “You’re like, dog-tagging me?”

Amir smiles weakly back. “Yeah.”

“Did you put your phone number on the back? And my rabies vaccination?”

“Shut up... It’s cute, right?”

“Nah, I like it a lot. Sorry I just got you cliche stuff,” Evan says, stretching his arm out so he can hook the bracelet on his wrist. Amir admires his veiny forearm as he does this. “I didn’t know how much you’d feel like celebrating today.”

“No, it’s fine. It was cute. And I know you’re kind of low on money right now.”

Evan winces. “Yeah.”

“And guess what,” Amir stage whispers, still pretty loopy from the drugs. “When I feel better… I’m gonna suck your dick. And not halfass. I’m gonna really, really suck your dick. ‘Cos you deserve it.”

“I mean, I’m not gonna say no to that,” Evan says, smiling, “but I dunno if I deserve it.”

“Nah…”

“No, for real. It’s my fault this all happened.”

“For the fortieth time, it’s _not_.”

“But we should’ve been using a condom, it’s dumb to risk it. And it was me who asked you if we could stop.”

“Yeah, ‘cos I said I wanted to go on the pill anyway, just to be safe... and I fucked that up…”

“But I put you in a position to fuck it up.”

He shrugs against the pillows. “I don’t blame you.”

Evan leans in to press a kiss to his forehead. “Get some sleep.”

Amir nods.

*

When he wakes up, he’s logy and drowsy, but he realizes immediately that Evan is gone.

“Evan,” Amir yells, instantly anxious, then realizes there’s a Post-It on his arm. He peels it off.

_your roommates asked if i could go pick up food. Stay in bed_

Great. Now he’s bored and alone, his least favorite things. He lolls in bed for a minute, watching late-afternoon shadows on his bedroom wall.

Oh God, Amir realizes suddenly, did he really blubber to Evan about how he wants a baby with him someday? Jesus Christ. And Evan _agreed_? What’s wrong with them?

Wanting a distraction and a dose of reality, he calls Zayn.

Zayn usually either doesn’t pick up and then two hours later texts _sorry i missed you_ , or he picks up on the first ring. This is a first ring call. “Hullo,” he says cheerfully.

“Hi,” Amir says, happy to hear his voice. They haven’t talked on the phone in a few weeks.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing. Just hanging out.”

“Monday, innit? You don’t have class?”

Amir suspects his dad is going to be able to read his weird energy, so he lies, “I had, um, a root canal, so I took the day off.”

“Oh, ouch. Poor lad.”

“Yeah.”

“How you feeling?”

Amir feels himself out. The sleep did him some good; he doesn’t feel as bad as before. “Okay,” he says honestly. “Kind of achy.”

“Yeah, that’s not fun.”

Zayn’s tone is gentle and light; he must be glad Amir called. A lump rises in Amir’s throat. Things haven’t been quite right between them for a while now, not since the relapse.

He’s always relied on Zayn to be larger than life. He needs him, wants him to be steady and sure and _there_ more than he wants almost anyone else to be, because no one else understands quite like Zayn does.

He doesn’t have that internal grit that Louis and Mia have. Small hurts send him tumbling to the ground. He’s always felt like Zayn was the same way, and when Zayn tumbles, it’s like the world falling off its axis. Amir needs his dad to show him the way, he needs to show him how he can live in the world and be happy in spite of it all. How not to self-sabotage and implode.

“No, it’s not fun,” Amir agrees. “So what’s up with you? What are you doing today?”

“Oh,” Zayn says. “Um. I had a meeting, it went well —”

“Capitol?”

“Eh, yeah,” Zayn says, sounding surprised. “How’d you know about that?”

“From Dad.”

“You two talk about me?” Sounding amused, now.

“Just a little. He’s happy for you.” Happy probably isn’t the right word, but oh well. Amir likes to manufacture goodwill between his parents.

“Well, good. Um, yeah, I’m just trying to sort of… do a bit of rebranding. You’re with one outfit too long and they try to take advantage, so let that be a lesson to you. Your fans are yours, y’know, they don’t give a shit about some shit record company, ‘specially in this day and age with how everyone lives on social media. It’s only a matter of limiting how much they can fuck you legally wiv ownership and marketing and things, and that’s why you always, always negotiate a good contract.”

“I know,” Amir says, grinning. Zayn never gave him the sex talk, he left that to Louis, but he’s given him the record deal talk like fifteen times.

“I know you know, just a reminder. Anyway, that’s all done with. So now I’m waiting for Harry to get home from the shops, and then we’ll pick the girls up from school and take them to their art thing. Art… enrichment wotsit. And then I made us a picnic dinner to take on the boat and do our Valentine’s Day thing.”

“How are the girls?”

“Ahh, they’re mint,” he says. “Doing really well. Well, you know, you text wiv ‘em.”

“Yeah,” Amir says. “They’re sweet. They like to hear about my fabulous life in New York.”

Zayn laughs. “Yeah, they think quite highly of you and Yasmeen. Think you’re just the coolest. What’s got you asking after all of us?”

“I dunno. Just making sure everything’s okay.”

“Everything’s okay,” Zayn says gently. “Promise.”

“Okay. Good. Baba?”

“Yeah?”

“I wish you liked Evan.”

Zayn sighs gustily, then goes quiet for a moment.

“I don’t not like Evan,” he says. “I think you’re a very talented, smart, driven kid, and I think Evan is a little lost.”

“I’m not so smart,” Amir says, rolling onto his side. He feels achy again. “And Evan’s not so lost.”

“It’s just hard for me, Amir. You’re my only son. You’re… y’know. I want you to have everything I never had.” His voice over the phone sounds pained. “I want you to do everything I didn’t do.”

“That’s so much to put on me,” Amir murmurs. “You’ve done a lot.”

Zayn’s quiet for a long moment. “No one’s ever taken me seriously as an artist,” he says, finally. “I’ll always be that guy from One Direction.”

“Dad…”

“No, let me talk. It’s sort of like we signed a deal with the devil, all of us. We can get a bit of legitimacy here and there, from other things… acting, fashion. But musically… God, I always wanted to be somebody serious. I always wanted to be, like — well, you know who I mean. It’s all the artists _you_ love and look up to, right? You don’t look up to anybody who got their start in a boyband, then made, y’know, a bit of fuck-me music to try to have an edge.”

“Dad, I look up to you,” Amir says in a small voice, but Zayn isn’t listening.

“It’s like coming up from Disney,” he says. “You just never lose that beginning. You never get the thing you truly want. But if you didn’t start out where you did, no one would ever know you to begin with.” His voice tails off into a soft little exhale. “It’s taken me decades to come to terms with this. I don’t want to sound like this bitter old shit, I really don’t. But I’ve tried so hard to change it, and it’s like trying to turn fucking… dirt into gold or something. Just not gonna happen.”

It’s horrible, it’s all horrible, mostly because it’s so many things Amir had always suspected that Zayn felt.

“Listen,” Amir says, “that’s so unfair to you, though. It’s unfair to all of you. You’ve made good music. You’ve made music people love.”

“Even when I do, I’m still me. Listen, though, listen,” Zayn says more urgently, “this ain’t about me, it’s about you. You have the talent and the brain to be someone serious, Amir, somebody people really respect and admire. A musician’s musician, yeah? I can see that future for you. It’s not just my pride, either, loads of other people can see it too. Louis sees it, and he’s got an eye for talent like that, that’s why he pushes you. That’s why we both push you.”

“That’s so much pressure…”

“You need pressure,” Zayn says. “Nobody ever thrived without pressure. And look, if you didn’t want it, that would be one thing, I’d leave you be. But you do, I know you do. We didn’t push you in that direction. You were always the one who pursued music, we never forced it, and you’ve worked so hard at it. It’d kill me if you had regrets down the road, and there was something I could’ve done differently… you’re special, Amir, you’ve got something special. You’re such a smart musician, you’ve got such a lovely voice. I admire you, genuinely… that’s why I asked you to play on my next record.”

More aches. He curls inward on himself, buried in his sheets. God, he definitely can never tell Zayn about the abortion, it would crush him. “Thanks, Dad,” he murmurs. “But what does this have to do with Evan?”

“I just don’t want him distracting you.”

“With what? What’s he gonna distract me with?”

Zayn is quiet, for a moment.

“Did Dad distract you?” Amir says softly. “With us?”

“No, no,” he replies immediately. “Not at all, that’s not what I’m talking about… look, your dad and I had more career in five years than most people do in a whole lifetime. You’re still at the beginning of yours, and if you need to tour, or need to go live in a little apartment in New Orleans just to be around jazz, or whatever you need to do — being tied to someone can stop you doing things like that, especially when it’s somebody less educated and less ambitious than you are.”

“He has more ambition than you think,” Amir says. “If you think I’m so smart and great and together, then can you just listen to me about him? D’you think me and him don’t discuss this stuff? D’you think I’m just like this — this little idiot who loves my idiot boyfriend? ‘But Daddy, I love him!’”

Zayn laughs. “That from _The Little Mermaid_?”

“Yeah, good pull.”

“Well, I’ve got two little girls.”

“Evan loves me, he’s nice to me, he’s done shit for me you’ll never know about. And he has plans. He wants to go back to school in the fall.”

“Good,” Zayn says, sounding strainedly chipper. “I’m glad to hear it. He ought to be in school.”

“And I have plans for him, alright? I have plans for shit we’re gonna do together, and how I’m gonna help him fulfill his own dreams. And maybe, Dad, you can get with it and realize that if I was with somebody who was trying to do the kinds of things I’m doing, _that_ would be a distraction. That they’d suck me up into their life. I mean, how much have you and Harry fought ‘cos your careers got in the way of each other? How much stress has that caused you?”

“Alright,” Zayn cuts him off. “A little respect, please. I’m not Louis. You’re my son, not my pal.”

“Well, stop insulting my boyfriend every chance you get! He’s my best friend, too, he’s been in my life forever, you really hurt me when you come after him!”

An even longer, gustier sigh than before, and some silence.

“I’m sorry,” Zayn says. His voice has changed; he sounds gentle again like he did before. “I get how that’s hurtful to you, I do. And I don’t hate Evan. I know he loves you. I just think… you don’t have to be with someone at all, right now, especially not this seriously.”

“But I _am_! And I don’t want to be alone, I hate being alone.”

“Yeah. You take after Louis that way.”

“You, too,” Amir jabs.

Zayn laughs. “Yeah. You’re right. But I know what it’s like to fall in love as a teenager, I do. I know how fuckin’ hard it is to try to grow with somebody… or realize you can’t, and you’ve got to break up. I know how hard it is to put your soul into something at that age and then have that inevitable difficulty down the road when you grow up and everything starts changing on you, your circumstances and your dreams and who you are. It’s so rare that me and Harry managed to make it work after all this time, after we were both in love with other people and distant and apart, and… y’know.”

“Evan already has grown, okay? He’s grown in a good way. It’s made us closer.”

“Yeah. You’ve said.” He sounds hoarse. “Look, you’re just my only son. I dunno, it’s hard. Harder than it is with any of the girls. It’s like what King George said about his kids — you’re my pride, the girls are my joy.”

“Uh, I don’t bring you joy?” Amir says, and they both laugh.

“Different sort of joy,” Zayn says. “I’m sorry if this shit weighs on you, love. Louis and I are just so chuffed that you’re musical the way you are, maybe it makes us act a bit crazy. I think you’ve already found that in life, that people just act a bit crazy around you, tend to project on you. I always worry it’s made you a bit afraid of people, maybe afraid of fame. I don’t want you to be shy like me.”

“I am who I am.”

“I know. And I know you take things hard. I worry about you getting hurt.”

“I’m tougher than you think I am,” Amir says quietly.

“I know. I know.”

“And Evan doesn’t want to hurt me.”

Zayn makes a soft sound. “I never wanted to hurt anybody I ever hurt,” he says. “Hurt ‘em anyway.”

Amir clears his throat. “Do you think if you’d stayed together with Harry, he wouldn’t have had the career he does?”

“I have no idea,” Zayn says. “I’m sure we wouldn’t have managed to stay together long.”

“But you said you loved him.”

“I did. But I was very stupid,” Zayn says, making them both laugh. “And Harry was, ah… sort of romantic and naive. And the entire world was lookin’ at us. It was a very unique situation.”

They’re quiet again for a moment. Amir’s cramps are starting to subside, although he pulls the CBD pen off his bedside table and pulls on it just in case they come back.

“Was he your best friend in the band, at first?” he says.

“Oh, nah… that was always your dad, or, uh, Liam. I mean, me and him got on, but there was, y’know, always sort of a tension, ‘cos we fancied each other from the jump. And then we got together, and we were together, then we broke up, and things were awkward. We didn’t talk much then. I mean, we cared for each other, still. It’s just hard to be in such close quarters, in that situation. And then it got harder after, um.” He trails off.

“After you got engaged?” Amir says cannily.

“Right. Always forget how much you kids know… it’s too much, if you ask me.”

“We know pretty much everything.”

“I know,” Zayn says. “I blame Louis for that. He’s not one for bein’ evasive.”

“No,” Amir agrees. “But, I mean, the Internet also exists.”

“Right, yeah, fuckin’ Internet. Even worse than Louis.”

Over the crystal-clear sound coming in from Zayn’s Bluetooth, he hears a door shut and Harry calling out.

“Hey,” Zayn says, “speak of the devil, Haz just got home, so d’you mind if I let you go? Not that I don’t love talking with you, I just want to get him to take a look at this leak we’ve got in our basement ceiling before I forget. I’m not quite tall enough, I need a giraffe man.”

“Wow,” Harry says in the background, sounding amused. “I’m not even going to respond to that, ‘cos you don’t want to hear what I’d say back.”

“Oi,” Zayn says.

“Alright, bye,” Amir says, laughing. “Dad? Um… sorry for the drama.”

“Oh, no drama, love. Glad to get your perspective on things. I hope I enlightened you to mine, a bit.”

This is classic AA talk, but Amir appreciates it all the same. He enjoys being spoken to like he’s a real, bona-fide adult. “You did.”

“Alright. I love you.”

“Love you too.”

Zayn hangs up on him, and he lies there for a moment, looking at the wall that has his plasma TV mounted on it. Amir waves his watch at it to turn it on, then puts on PBS’s dedicated jazz channel. It’s airing a recording of last year’s New Orleans Jazz Fest. He turns the volume down to background noise level, then he calls Mia.

It rings for a while, and then she finally picks up, breathing heavily. “Yeah?”

“Hey,” Amir says. “You at practice?”

“No, going for a run off-campus.”

“Can you talk?”

“Sure, I’m like five miles in, I can stop for a sec. What’s up?”

Five miles, Jesus Christ. “I just wanted to tell you something,” he says. “I wanted to before, but I didn’t want to freak you out, so I’m telling you now that it’s like, over.”

“What’d you do?” Mia says, and he can hear the older-sisterly eyeroll in her voice.

“Nothing. Uhh…” He exhales. “Shit, this is hard, I dunno why.”

“You can tell me anything, you know that.”

“I know. Yeah. Um, so... what happened is… I found out I was pregnant, like a week ago? And I had an abortion this morning.”

Silence, other than her still breathing hard. “Shit,” Mia finally says, her voice completely different. “Oh, shit, Amir, that sucks.”

“It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be,” Amir says. “The abortion part.”

“Yeah, you sound, like, weirdly cheerful?”

“It’s the drugs,” he says, and she laughs. “And the relief, I guess?”

“Yeah, I can imagine. Holy shit. A baby. That would be awful. _You’re_ still a baby.”

“I’m not that young!”

“You’re not even twenty!”

“I’m as good as twenty! I’d have been twenty when it was born.”

“Oh, don’t say that,” Mia groans. “This is so weird. My baby brother could’ve had a baby.”

“I’m not a baby! I’m a year younger than you!”

“You’re still my baby brother, you’ll always be my baby brother.”

Amir decides against telling her that she’s literally turning into Louis. He thinks she probably knows that anyway. “Look, don’t feel sorry for me, okay?”

“I don’t!” Mia exclaims. “It’s just, y’know, I already worry about you being all alone in New York, and now you — I mean, are you okay? Did you go to a good doctor and stuff?”

“No, I went to some guy in an alley,” Amir deadpans. “I’m actually bleeding out, so I have to go.”

“Oh, there’s the Amir we know and love.”

“Yeah, I went to a good doctor! I got a recommendation from Dad.”

Mia’s quiet for a moment. “You told Dad and not me? I guess that makes sense.”

“He’s had like ten kids, I figured he knew the deal. I thought you’d just yell at me for not being safe enough.”

“I don’t _yell,_ ” Mia scoffs.

“I’m not all alone in New York, by the way, I have Evan.”

“Right, Evan! How’s he been about this whole thing? Wait, is he even in the city? I saw him on Insta, posting stuff from the mountains.”

“He’s in the city, he came back as soon as I told him last week.”

“Good. Did he go with you and stuff?”

“Yeah. He actually made the whole thing, like, way less shitty.”

“Oh, that’s good,” Mia says. “I’m really glad to hear that.”

“Yeah.” He hesitates. “We even had the big talk a couple hours ago.”

“Big talk…” She trails off. “Like, the future talk?”

“Yeah. Future talk… and we’re on the same page, so.”

“What, did you do like a promise ring type of thing?”

“No, nobody gave anybody a promise ring, but yeah. We used the M word, and stuff.”

“Shit! Aw, I’m so happy for you guys.” Her breathing has evened out, and he can hear how pleased she is.

“Plus, he told me he’d have married me if I’d wanted to keep the baby,” Amir says drily.

“Oh, Jesus, what a nightmare that would have been. He wouldn’t even get the chance, Pops would have run him down with the Maybach or shot him or something.”

Amir laughs.

“You know, he really loves you. I can tell ‘cos he doesn’t find you half as annoying as he should.”

“Fuck off.”

“He probably always _will_ love you, ‘cos you took his virginity.”

“Stop,” Amir complains. “I told you that in private, don’t just go around saying it out loud on the street.”

“I’m serious, though! That goes deep.”

“Well, I don’t give a fuck about Sebastian,” Amir says. “Do you give a fuck about, I forget, who was it — Brian Skinner from the lacrosse team?”

“Technically I hooked up with Brian’s girlfriend Fiona before I hooked up with him,” Mia admits. “On the same night.”

“And you have the _audacity_ to call me slutty?”

“I drank a lot in high school, what can I say. No, but like, you took his virginity _and_ you actually dated him. You’re each other’s first loves. That’s deep, trust me.”

“I guess.”

She’s quiet for a moment. “Wait… so you guys got an abortion on Valentine’s Day?”

“It was the soonest appointment they had!”

“God, Amir,” Mia says, laughing, then drops her voice to a whisper: “Also, I said that kind of loud by accident, and this woman walking her dog past me gave me the _bitchiest_ look.”

“Tell her to mind her own business.”

“She’s walking a German Shepherd, so I’m good. How’d this even happen?”

“What?”

“You know what.”

“It just happened. I’m on the pill, but shit happens.”

Mia sighs. “You should get on the implant, like I am.”

“But you said it hurt insanely bad to get that put in.”

“It did, but now I don’t have to worry about it, so.”

“I’ll think about it,” Amir says.

“So… what was it like?” Mia says, sounding a little tentative. “Being pregnant?”

“It was like being sick, but it lasted forever.”

“That’s it? You didn’t feel different at all?”

“Nah, just felt sick. And I guess a little, like, sensitive. Evan kept hurting my feelings by accident.”

She laughs. “How is that any different from normal?”

“Fuck off.”

“Are you feeling okay now?”

Amir hesitates, not wanting to be pitied, but wanting to be fussed over for being such a brave little trooper. “It hurts,” he says. “I’d give abortions like, a two out of ten.”

“Harry’s tomatoes,” Mia says.

Amir laughs. One of Harry’s last grabs for an Oscar before he stepped back from his career had been a movie that was critically well-received, but very boring and so detested by the general public that it netted a 17% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. It came out October 2036, right after Zayn had gotten out of rehab, so Harry was extra touchy about the whole thing. Mia then made things worse by dressing up as the score for Halloween that year, arriving at the Malibu house to take the girls trick-or-treating wearing a massive poster board of the screenshotted web page, plus a sash that read AUDIENCES HATE IT! She got Harry laughing at himself by the end of the night, though. Now every time something sucks, they give it a rating of “Harry’s tomatoes.”

“You know, I’m actually amazed you’re not being more dramatic about this whole situation,” Mia says.

“I’ve been pretty dramatic, the past few days,” Amir admits. “I think it’s just out of my system now.”

“That sounds about right.”

“Whatever. So how’s Aya?”

“Nice segue. She’s good. We’re going to the beach tonight to do a romantic picnic thing.”

“You’re copying Pops,” Amir says. “He’s doing a picnic on the boat with Harry.”

“I know, I got the idea from him,” Mia says, laughing. “I was like, Dad, help, what’s romantic?”

“So no hot-air balloon ride?”

“Hot-air — what?”

“In my head I was convinced you guys were going on a hot-air balloon ride,” Amir says. “Through wine country.”

“You’re so funny. Where do you come up with this stuff? No, no hot-air balloon ride. We are going up to Dad’s in a couple weeks, though, to do like a double vineyard date with him and Liam.”

“That’s cute,” Amir says, feeling lonely and kind of jealous at the thought. He really is homesick. Can’t somebody just fold the country in half already? He doesn’t like the stuff in the middle very much, except for the music scenes in Kansas City and New Orleans.

“Yeah, Aya can’t wait,” Mia says. “She just spent like two months in Iran with her family over break, apparently alcohol is illegal over there? It’s super hard to get.”

“Yeah, I knew that.”

“Well, excuse me, human encyclopedia. So are you and Evan gonna get dinner or something? Do anything romantic? Or are you bedridden?”

“Not bedridden. And he went to go get takeout for everybody.”

“What, you guys and your roommates eating takeout? That’s not romantic.”

“It’s whatever, he can make up for it on my birthday.”

Amir hears the front door to the apartment open, then shut, and Greg yell out, “Eyyyy! Food!”

“Actually, I think he’s back now,” he says.

“Okay, let me go, then,” Mia says. “I have to finish this stupid run. Actually, I’ll probably just walk home, whatever… I’m benched tomorrow anyway. But ring me back if you want to talk or something, okay? Just not tomorrow morning, ‘cos I’m on a plane to Pennsylvania.”

“Pennsylvania? Ew.”

“Gotta play Penn State at Penn.”

“But you just said you’re benched, you have to fly to Pennsylvania just to be benched?”

“I might sub in,” Mia says, then adds darkly: “You never know, Jia might break her leg or something.”

“Are there even any good bars there?”

“Fuck no. It’s bumfuck. I don't know why anyone goes there, I’d kill myself.”

Amir laughs. “Well, enjoy that.”

“I won’t,” Mia says. “Bye-e, _chhota bhai_. Take care of yourself, alright?”

“I will. Bye.”

He texts Louis, _I told dad i had a root canal today so if he mentions that to you, please don’t bust me_ , then gingerly crawls out of bed.

In the living room, the three boys are already devouring boxes of Chinese food. Amir hangs out at the end of the hallway, watching them in mild disgust and trying to figure out if he actually has an appetite. Jordan and Greg are having a mild argument about whether or not Schubert was more innovative than Beethoven.

Jordan finally looks up and spots him. “Hey,” he says.

“Hi.”

“Hey,” Evan says. “I got you dumplings. The vegetable ones, not pork.”

Amir smiles. “Thanks. Not sure if I’m hungry.”

“You sick or something?” Greg says.

Evan and Amir exchange a glance.

“Yeah,” Amir says. “I have some kind of, um, weird stomach bug.”

“That explains throwing up in the sink,” Jordan says. “That was nasty.”

Amir comes over and sits on the couch next to Evan. The smell of grease makes him kind of queasy, but at the same time, he is hungry.

“Gimme your lettuce,” he says to Evan.

Evan laughs, but he picks his coconut shrimp off of their bed of lettuce and piles them atop his lo mein, handing the container to Amir. Amir takes some duck sauce and drizzles it on the lettuce, then tosses it like a salad and starts eating it.

“Okay,” Greg says, laughing. “Rabbit boy. You’re so weird.”

“Leave me alone!”

“Here, take these chilies,” Evan says, carefully transferring a forkful to Amir. “They're too hot for me.”

“These are too hot for you? They’re barely hot, man.”

“Your boyfriend is _very_ white,” Jordan says.

“I know,” Amir says. “One time he got the hot salsa at Chipotle by accident and he literally started choking.”

Jordan cackles.

“Look at his sunburn. He’s outside all year round and he still burns.”

“Why are you roasting me right now?” Evan says through a mouthful of shrimp. “I’m admitting to it, I didn’t even try to eat them.”

“It’s reparations,” Jordan tells him.

“What are watching, boys?” Greg says, flicking his watch at the TV and turning it on. “Mozart in the Jungle?”

“We have no joke watched that together like three times now,” Jordan says. “We need something new.”

Amir nudges Evan’s leg. “Put that YouTube guy on we were watching the other day.”

“Oh, shit, yes,” Evan says, swiping his own watch at the TV to take control of it. “You guys are gonna love this...”

Greg nods in recognition as he pulls the channel up. “Is this the guy who stands outside a courthouse and scans people’s faces to pull up their criminal record while they’re coming out?”

“Yeah!” Amir says.

“And like, asks them about what they did? Like one time he got some guy who fucked his landlord’s dog?”

“It’s so bad,” Amir says, laughing. “But I love when they try to hit him. I’m always waiting for somebody to knock him out.”

“Okay, I have to see this,” Jordan says, looking up from his fried rice. “I don’t believe this is real.”

“It’s real,” Amir says. “They film it in New Jersey, too, like not even an hour from here. We know the cameraman, he used to work for our friend Matt.”

Evan turns to Amir. “We should —“

“— drive to that court on a day they’re filming so we can watch?” Amir finishes, reading his mind.

Evan grins. “Is that fucked up?”

“I mean, the show wasn’t _our_ idea.”

“I’m definitely coming with you,” Greg says.

“You know who else would love to come?” Amir says to Evan.

“Patrick?”

“Yup.”

“Wait, turn it up,” Jordan says. “I still can’t believe this is a real show. How is this not illegal?”

Amir snuggles up against Evan on the couch, leaning into his shoulder. He’s suddenly sleepy again, but not tired enough to nap. Just tired enough to not hold up his own body weight.

“Can I have a dumpling?” he says.

Evan hands him the container of them.

MANHATTAN, FEBRUARY 27, 2037

Amir’s band (currently going by the Amsterdam Five, as they’re a quintet again with the recent addition of a saxophonist) has a gig at The Cutting Room on Saturday night. They usually play little jazz clubs, and this is a bigger venue with a significantly more mainstream audience, so he spends the entire Saturday clammy and distracted.

In the Uber over to the club, Amir practices scales with his fingers on the seat; Evan notices this and laughs like it’s cute.

“You worried you’re gonna forget how to play?” he teases Amir.

“Nah, but I didn’t play as much the last couple weeks.”

“I feel like if you didn’t play for a month, you’d still be better than most people.”

“But I want to be my _best_.”

Evan sighs at him.

“Plus they have a real piano there,” Amir says. “I’m used to playing on a keyboard at gigs, and in my apartment. I only play actual piano at school, and those are usually uprights, and this is a grand.”

“It’s still a piano,” Evan says gently.

“What if it’s a full house?” Amir is suddenly gripped with a brand-new fear: “Nah, what if no one’s there?”

“Even better, ‘cos then you don’t have to worry about fucking up,” Evan says, shrugging. “Just play to me. I’ll throw dollar bills at you guys.”

Amir cracks up. “Why?”

“I dunno. I think I got bands mixed up with strippers. What do you do to bands? I’ll throw bras at you.”

“Where you gonna get bras at?”

“I’ll go find some,” Evan offers. “Or I’ll just throw my underwear at you.”

“I like that you said find and not _get_ , like there’s bras lying around in the street and you can just go grab some.”

“Dude, probably. It’s New York.”

*

It is a full house. As they make their way up the stairs and through the crowd, Amir squeezes Evan’s hand to say _I told you._ Evan squeezes him back as if to say, _I know, but it’s okay._

The backstage is dimly lit, and the one mirror he can find is so smudged that Amir can barely get a good look at himself. He keeps rubbing it with his shirttail to no avail until Eric walks up behind him, claps him on the back and says, “I promise you look fine, kiddo. You look like young Elvis!”

“I look like _who?_ ”

“Oh my God, don’t tell me you don’t know who Elvis is.”

“I know who Elvis is, I just don’t see the resemblance.”

Eric shrugs. “Most handsome guy who ever lived.”

“That’s definitely not true,” Amir calls after him as he walks away. “But thanks.”

He squints at himself in the mirror and slicks his hair back more.

Someone taps him on the shoulder, and he turns. It’s a pretty redheaded girl, about his age, wearing a polo with the venue’s logo on it like she works here. She smiles at him and hands him a mirror the size of the palm of his hand.

“Oh, thanks,” he says.

“No problem,” she says, then walks on through the doorway to the back hall that leads to the offices.

Amir can always rely on random women being nice to him. He knows they all want something from him, but it’s comforting just the same.

He comes over to his band, examining his face in the mirror. He looks good, though he does see the Elvis resemblance. He put too much product in his hair and it’s artificially swooshy, like how his dads’ hair always looks in super old pictures of them. He messes it up a little, then pouts at himself. He already did his under-eye circles with concealer and put dots of glittery silver eyeshadow in all four corners.

His aunt Lottie taught him that trick. Harry and Lottie combined have taught him everything he knows about makeup.

Amir swaggers up to the couch, where everyone’s tuning their instruments. One perk of playing the house’s piano is he doesn’t have to carry anything around, plus they’ve already tuned it for him. “What’s up? You guys ready?”

Chance, their new saxophonist, looks him up and down. “Amir, I don’t love those shoes.”

Chance is the closest in age to Amir of any of them — he’s 30, and he isn’t set enough in his ways to insist _it’s all about the music, guys,_ the way the rest of the band does.

Amir glances down. He’s in his usual gig outfit — the Rolex that Zayn gave him, a bunch of silver rings, black tee, tight black jeans, and maroon high-tops. “High-tops are cool again.”

“I know, I just feel like we could be a little more cohesive,” Chance says. “Like, Van’s in a Jimmy Buffett shirt, you’re dressed like Justin Bieber, and I have like, pressed slacks on.”

“Okay, I am not dressed like _Justin Bieber_ ,” Amir says, adjusting his septum ring. “Jump back.”

Evan is grinning to himself on a pouf chair. Amir gives him the finger.

“Eric thinks I look like Elvis,” he adds.

“No, you look like Sinatra,” Kurt says. “Like, when he was a kid. You know that poster everybody has of Sinatra? His mug shot? That’s who you look like.”

“Ol’ Blue Eyes,” Eric says.

“Why are we so worried about who I look like?” Amir says.

“You’re our frontman tonight!” Eric says, looking up from buffing his trumpet. “With this young audience, and you at that big piano? I guarantee, all eyes on you.”

Amir’s chest burns with anxiety. “Really?” he says, cracking a knuckle. “But you’re the bandleader.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

”Yeah, kid,” Kurt says, strumming his giant bass and peering at Amir over his bifocals. “Tonight, you’re Adam Levine.”

“I’m getting worried about you guys,” Amir says. “All of your references are from, like, fifty to a hundred years ago. Are you ghosts?”

“The thing you need to work on,” Eric interrupts, “is your confidence on stage. I feel like you could have a real presence, but you tend to hide behind the piano.”

Kurt, Van and Chance all nod at this. Evan watches them with curiosity, like he never realized this about his boyfriend.

“I’m confident,” Amir argues. “I’m confident in real life.”

“You can be pretty shy,” Evan says, and Amir shoots him a look. “What? You can be. I’ve known you since you were seven.”

“Either way, it doesn’t matter, ‘cos that’s you being yourself. On stage, you don’t want to be yourself,” Eric says. “If you’re yourself as a performer, then you have to deal with all this shit — energy from the audience, your own ego, all that. Put on an identity, be somebody else. That’s why Sir Elton John used to dress up like a fruitcake, may he rest in peace.”

“There you go again.”

“Well, it’s not my fault the industry hasn’t produced a genuine star for the last thirty years,” Eric says. “It’s all Swedish DJs on touchpads now, I can’t be expected to pay attention to that shit. I go with what I grew up with.”

Amir sits down on the couch next to Eric, kicking his feet up onto the battered trunk that’s serving as a coffee table.

“You should give yourself a stage name,” Evan suggests.

“Ooh, yeah,” Chance says.

“But I like my name,” Amir says.

“You don’t have to actually use it,” Eric says. “Just use it to craft a character. Let’s brainstorm. You like any names?”

“Enough to go by them? Not really.”

“Well, what’s Amir mean? Prince or something?”

Amir shrugs. “Yeah, prince.”

“Shit, yeah, use Prince,” Evan says.

Amir laughs. “That’s taken.”

“No, I mean literally, _be_ Prince. Just go out and pretend you’re Prince for a night. Like you’re channeling his spirit.”

“Stop it with all this ghost talk,” Van grunts.

Amir considers the idea. Kurt gives it a thumbs up.

“Alright, well, I need a weird jacket,” Amir says after a moment. “If I’m gonna be Prince. Anybody got a weird jacket?”

Eric grins. “That’s the spirit.”

Amir nods, then is struck with a sudden lurch of stage fright. He grabs a bottle of Jack Daniels off of the trunk, and knocks the cap off so he can drink three or four shots in one go.

Evan watches him do this, his eyes worried. Mercifully, he doesn’t say anything.

*

Polo girl ends up finding him something perfect in the backstage lost and found — it’s a lavender, structured military jacket that just happens to be in his size. It smells like stale sweat, but beggars can’t be choosers.

Amir looks at himself in the filthy mirror for half a second, decides he can pull it off if he fucks his hair up a little more, then does that and heads off to rock.

The club is beautiful, colorful and gleaming with brightly polished wood finishes. It’s like being inside of a carousel. He hesitates for a moment, lingering in the darkness of the wings, then walks out under the lights.

They’re playing a set that’s half covers of standards, and half original stuff that Eric and Van wrote — jazz fusion that falls somewhere between Steely Dan and New York Contemporary Five on the accessibility scale. Amir settles behind the piano, scanning the crowd to gauge their energy. He wishes it was the 1960s and this room was full of smoke and interesting people, seedy and dirty and strung out, still fully in love with jazz.

He tells himself to pretend. Pretend they’re whatever you need them to be, tonight.

Underneath the protective swaddle of alcohol that’s enveloping him, he feels a newly carefree attitude. He slides his finger down over the piano keys, and this echoes into the mic. A few people in the crowd look up and over at him; he flashes a grin at them.

“Good evening, beautiful people, we are the Amsterdam Five,” Eric says into the mic. “Amsterdam as in the street, not the city. I want to be clear on that. This is a New York combo, baby.”

Amir brings their setlist to the top of his mind and pins it there like a Post-It, hovering in his imagination, then poises his fingers over the keys to wait for Van’s countdown to _Caravan._ God, what a beautiful piano this is. He’s about to go apeshit on this piano.

Evan is in the crowd, right at the edge of the stage. Amir catches his eye and winks; Evan winks back.

“One, two, three, four!”

*

Amir plays like he doesn’t give a shit, plays like nobody's watching, bangs on the keys like he’s Billy Joel in a music video, and the crowd loves it. They don’t care when he misses a note here and there (it happens exactly three times since he’s not used to playing like a frantic lunatic) because they love the energy, and they whoop in excitement when he stands up to play even more forcefully. Since it’s going so well, he and Eric make the call to tack the band’s jazzy arrangement of _Dirty Work_ to the end of their set, and the crowd erupts in approval at the opening chords. They sing along for the whole thing and eat up Chance’s sax solo.

“Shit,” Chance whispers loudly when it’s all over, and they’re hurriedly working behind the curtain to dismantle Van’s drums before the next act comes to set up. “I think that’s the best we’ve ever played together.”

“It’s up there,” Eric agrees.

Amir is barely listening to them — his skin is buzzing like he’s on coke, and his brain isn’t working. He wants more, but of what, he isn’t sure. He doesn’t want to go meet the crowd one-on-one at the bar or anything, the very idea makes him anxious. He registers that he’s very sweaty, and tosses the stinky Prince jacket onto the floor.

Mostly he wants Evan. He wanders away from his band while they’re still breaking down (rude, but they can forgive him just this once) and heads down the stairs around the side of backstage, coming out and looking around.

Evan is only a few feet away, at the lip of the stage, sipping on a 7 and 7 he must have bought with his fake ID. When he sees Amir he immediately downs the rest of the drink, sets the glass on the stage and comes over to him.

Their bodies meet and Amir crushes their faces together, biting at Evan’s lower lip like a vampire. His skin, previously humming, now feels like it’s on fire; he just wants to be soothed by Evan’s calm presence and familiar body.

“Hey, hey,” Evan whispers when Amir starts grabbing at his belt. “Let’s go backstage?”

Amir drags him back there by the hand, pulling him into the dingy one-person bathroom and flipping the lock shut. “I want you,” he begs Evan, who makes a soft sound. He starts pawing at his fly again. “Fuck me on the sink.”

“You sure you’re good?” Evan says, even as he’s pulling Amir’s shirt up so he can slide his tight jeans down and off of him.

Amir hops up on the edge of the sink, nodding and sliding his fingers into Evan’s fine but thick hair. He’s referring to the fact that they haven’t had sex post-Valentine’s Day, yet. The first time they tried, a few days after, Amir randomly started crying and pushed him away. After that, no matter how many times he exclaimed that he was fine, Evan refused to touch him. They just fell asleep in frustrated silence.

He feels mostly fine, otherwise. Courtney called him a few days ago, catching him off-guard — normally he wouldn’t pick up a random call, but sometimes he gets work-related cold calls, now. She asked him how he was ‘coping.’ He told her he was fine. She asked if he was feeling melancholy or distressed, and he told her he kind of always does, but it wasn’t any worse than usual.

“Do you have a condom?” Amir says, addressing the elephant in the room.

Evan produces one from his pocket, and Amir tears his boxers down off him so he can help him put it on, since he’s already completely hard. They’re in the middle of this when the bathroom door opens.

It’s polo girl. She looks at them in shock, and then her face turns bright red. Amir pulls Evan flush between his legs so neither of them flash her their wieners. That would be ungentlemanly.

“Sorry,” she manages, avoiding eye contact. “Um, you guys really shouldn’t lock this. We have a policy that the musicians aren’t supposed to do that.”

“Relax, we aren’t doing drugs,” Amir says, completely blasé. “We’ll be out in a minute.”

Her face is still red. “Okay, fine,” she says. “Just clean up after yourselves.”

She ducks back out. The door bangs shut again, and a second later the lock flips again.

Evan starts laughing silently. “You just broke her heart, man.”

“She can join the club,” Amir purrs, then kisses him again, shoving his tongue into his mouth.

CATSKILL FOREST PRESERVE, MARCH 11, 2037

Amir isn’t sure what he’s looking for, he just know he’ll know it when he sees it. They’ve been hiking for about three hours before he stops dead in his tracks when they come to a clearing on the side of the mountain that’s overlooking a ravine below.

He walks toward the edge of the overlook, surveying the majesty of the scene below; the trees still dead from winter, but capped with snow, and the river winding through it. It’s a bright, cold day, and his breath makes fog in the air.

Evan turns to him, squinting hard as the midday sun flares across his face and into his eyes. The light makes his golden hair glow. “Wanna stop here?”

“Yeah,” Amir says.

He kneels in the grass, taking his backpack off and pulling a folder out of it. It has all of the receipts and paperwork from the abortion, plus the brochure Courtney gave him called WEIGHING YOUR OPTIONS.

“You have the bowl?” Evan says. “If you start a forest fire on this, I swear to God.”

“Yeah, I have the bowl…” Amir pulls a little cereal bowl out and starts crumpling the papers into it, then flicks his lighter and holds it to them until flame takes hold. “Stop being a cop.”

The papers go up fast, curling in on themselves as they burn.

“So, why’d you want to do this?” Evan says. “Like, a replacement for spreading actual ashes?”

“Kind of, I guess,” Amir says. “It’s just a closure thing.” He hesitates. “I don’t think there’d really be ashes left over from an abortion.”

“Probably not,” Evan says conversationally, like they’re discussing the weather. “We cremated my granddad, and he was a huge guy, and they fit him into a freezer bag.”

“Eww. A teaspoon, maybe?”

“Teaspoon? Not even. Demitasse spoon.”

“I’m gonna pretend you didn’t just say _demitasse_ spoon, WASP.”

“Sto-op,” Evan moans.

“Evan _Boatwright_ Stewart.”

“It’s my mom’s maiden name, okay?”

“It’s ridiculous.”

“I don’t disagree with you.”

Amir watches as the papers in the bowl burn themselves out, leaving only gray ashes behind. “Sorry if I’ve been weird about this whole thing,” he says. “It’s just been, like, a lot.”

“I know,” Evan says in a soft voice, looking away, out over the valley.

“I don’t mean to be sensitive about stuff,” Amir says. “I just don’t know how else to be.”

Evan turns back to him, his blonde fringe falling across his forehead, still squinting into the sun. “For the millionth time, I like that about you.” Evan holds his hand out, and Amir gives him the bowl. “Should I say something?”

“If you want.”

“What are we even doing? Asking for forgiveness?”

“Not _forgiveness_ ,” Amir says. Ever since the abortion actually happened, little comments like that keep slipping out of Evan, like he feels some invisible force shaming him. Amir blames his culturally conservative upbringing. “We didn’t do anything wrong. Just, like, wisdom, I guess.”

“You go first, then,” Evan says. “You’re religious, I’m not.”

“Not really. I only kind of believe in God.”

“Then why are you Muslim?”

Amir gazes down at the rolling hills below them, then pushes down a flash of vertigo and huddles inside his North Face. “I just am.”

“I mean, I am Protestant, but I’m not actually a Protestant.”

“I like being part of something, I dunno. I like having something with my dad, my dad’s family, my sisters.”

“Then you know what you’re doing,” Evan gently urges. “You pray, and stuff.”

Amir takes the bowl back from him, shaking it into the wind. Ash comes out and is picked up and carried away over the side of the mountain, dropping into the gorge below.

“Alright, um,” he says. “ _Bismillahir rahmanir raheem_.”

He looks down at his hands, twisting his rings.

“Thank you for the wisdom and maturity to make the right decision,” Amir says softly. “Thank you for empowering me to fight for what I want, and really think about what Evan means to me. Thank you for uniting my heart with his in holy grace, and giving us both a partner in life to rely on.”

Evan looks a little emotional. He glances down, swallowing.

“And thank you for granting me the wisdom and empathy to fight for what Evan wants. I guess this whole thing was a blessing that way, because it brought us even closer together… I think if you do exist, and have infinite wisdom, you knew that’s what would happen, so thanks.” He shrugs. “This isn’t a dua. I don’t want anything. Except more wisdom, maybe. You can give me as much wisdom as you want.”

Evan clears his throat. “Thank you for knowing we weren’t ready to have a kid. ‘Cos my whole situation is pretty fragile right now.”

“I know,” Amir murmurs. He fiddles with his rings some more.

“But you were so sure about this,” Evan says. “I’m glad it was your choice, honestly, ‘cos you’re… I mean, for all the shit I give you about being dramatic, you really are, like, the logical one. You’re the smartest guy I know. I might’ve fucked this up, if it was me in your situation.”

He takes the bowl and shakes it into the wind; the remaining ashes blow away.

“You wouldn’t have fucked it up,” Amir says quietly, a smile playing at his lips. He loves it when Evan compliments his brain. “You would’ve done the right thing. You’re practical.”

“I dunno,” Evan says. “It’s hard.” He looks away, out over the ravine, his jaw stiff. “And sometimes I do, like… I want, like, a fresh start. A family that... y’know.”

“Yeah. I know you miss them.”

Evan shakes his head. “I miss something that never existed,” he says with difficulty. “I miss, like — I’m the one who changed, not them, y’know? They were always like this, I just didn’t want to see it.”

Amir is quiet. Evan sounds pained, like this is very hard for him to put into words. He almost sounds like he’s ceding defeat to a force much larger than him. “It sucks,” he says, sort of uselessly.

“It does. It’s fucking hard, sometimes. So I don’t know what I’d do. I don’t know what it’s like to be pregnant.”

“I felt normal,” Amir says. “I didn’t go crazy or anything. I knew we couldn’t have a baby right now, so we didn’t. That was it.”

Evan nods hard. “Yeah.”

“I want you to get everything you want. I want us both to, I want us both kicking ass, together. Y’know?”

“I hope so. I hope it works out like that.”

“It’s going to!”

Evan turns toward the sun, squinting but smiling; Amir sneaks his phone from his pocket and snaps a quick photo of him.

“I saw that,” Evan says, still looking out over the hills, his cheeks getting a little pinker.

“Shut up,” Amir mutters as he uploads the photo and edits it lightning-fast. “You take pictures of me all the time, loser.”

“Yeah, but I take those for me, not social media…”

“Whatever, I’m on private everywhere. People know we’re together, you know.”

“I know.”

“Everyone from high school, who you barely talk to anymore ‘cos you’re busy being a recluse —”

“Shut the fuck up,” Evan exclaims, laughing. “I talk to way more people from high school than you do! You think you’re better than all of them.”

“ _Please_ ,” Amir says. He uploads the picture to Insta, then tags it to send it to three different photo collections on his account: #evan and #happystuff and #newyork2037. His social media is hyper-private, but hyper-organized; in high school he once had Harry’s social media manager show him how to do a 9-block grid on Instagram so he could post a massive version of his campaign poster during his run for student council president.

“I still talk to Kai, Kyle, Ashton, McKenna,” Evan says. “You talk to, like, me, and Jason, and that’s it.” His watch lights up with the notification that he’s been tagged, and he glances down at it. “Happy stuff, huh?” he says with a grin. “You have a crush on me or something?”

“I literally wake up to see you staring at me like once a week, you psycho.”

“It’s ‘cos you always have something on your face.”

“I don’t have anything on my face except probably your dick when you sit there jerking off on my unconscious body.”

Evan laughs hard at this. “You think I jerk off by rubbing my dick on your face?”

“I wouldn’t know what freaks like you do,” Amir says primly.

“How about this, I stare at you ‘cos I’m so thankful about how quiet you are when you’re asleep.”

Amir glares daggers at him. “Dick.”

“You started it.”

“ _You_ started it!”

“You’re right,” Evan says apologetically. “Truce.” With a groan, he pops up to his feet and extends his hand to Amir, helping him up. “Ready to roll out?”

“Is walking down gonna be easier than walking up?”

Evan looks at him like he’s nuts. “That was such an easy hike! It’s only seven miles.”

“Uh, okay,” Amir says in a mocking imitation of his voice as he dusts his jeans off. “Sure. Can you go a little fucking slower this time, though? And more water breaks.”

“Yes princess,” Evan says, then ducks to avoid being swatted.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Amir says. “You know how my dad and Liam had all that insurance money left over from the fire?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“They bought a cabin on Tahoe, since it’s like a half-hour from their new place. They just closed the deal.”

“Oh, nice. I love Tahoe.”

“Yeah, but you’re not allowed to go, ‘cos you called me princess,” Amir says, then scampers away down the hill, giggling as Evan chases after him. “They got a condo in San Fran too, you can go there!”

“You know I hate San Fran!” Evan yells after him. “The streets aren’t level! It freaks me out!”

“Yeah, I guess if you can fall skateboarding on a flat surface, that would be scary,” Amir yells over his shoulder. Then, in a moment of karmic retribution, he trips on an unseen rock and falls on his ass, rolling down the hill.

“Oh shit. Amir!”

Amir tucks himself into a little ball, shielding his face with his forearms as he rolls over scratchy branches and small rocks. Finally he hits the trunk of a tree with his lower back, which stops his momentum, but hurts.

He opens his eyes, squinting up at the lacy canopy of trees overhead, and takes stock of himself. His clothes are ripped up, and his cheek is wet. He touches it. Blood.

“Fuck,” Amir says pitifully.

Evan jogs down the hill and stops, squatting next to him. “You okay?” he says, all worried.

“Is my face fucked up?”

Evan presses his fingers gingerly to Amir’s cheekbone. “Just a tiny scrape.”

“Then I’m fine, yeah.”

Evan laughs. “If your face is fine, you’re fine?”

“My face and my hands, that’s where all the money is.” Amir wiggles his fingers. “Am I gonna scar?”

“You’re definitely not gonna scar.”

“Boo.”

“You _want_ a scar?”

“A little one. Girls love scars.”

Evan looks a little affronted as he brushes twigs out of Amir’s hair. “Since when do you care what girls love?”

“Think about it,” Amir says. “Who buys jazz albums from good-looking young-ass guys? Intellectual city women, right?”

He laughs. “Right, how could I forget your plan to seduce all the intellectual city women.”

“Yeah! When I’m solo, they’re gonna be my loyal core audience. That’s the smartest thing my dads’ band ever did, is keeping the girls happy. Girls are loyal, plus they spend hella money.”

Evan reaches up and knuckles away the blood on his cheek. “So you definitely wanna be solo?”

“Duh,” Amir says. “Only way to do it.”

“What about your band? You guys were great together last month.”

He shrugs. “I play jazz. It’s not, like, the Brockhampton. You play with whoever you play with. I’ll probably still play with them sometimes… but even right now, I play with other bands, I work whenever I can.”

Evan nods. “I just like the idea of you in a band,” he says. “Like, permanently. If you were on the road, or something… doing that alone seems shitty.”

“Well, you’ll come with me,” Amir says, confused.

Evan lets out a little sigh. “I dunno. It’ll depend, right?”

Amir nods, feeling the chill of uncertainty settle over him again. “Let’s go back to the cabin,” he says, extending a hand up to Evan. “I’m cold, and my ass hurts.”

Evan laughs, pulling him to his feet, and drags him in for a kiss — first on Amir’s cheek where his scrape is, to kiss it better, and then on his mouth. Amir smiles into the kiss, reaching up to ruffle his hair at the back of his neck. He can taste his blood on Evan’s lips.

“Wait, shh,” Evan says, pulling away. “Look behind you… but slow.”

Amir turns. There’s a fox about ten feet away, peering at them from behind a tree.

“Oh, cool,” Amir whispers.

“Look, though… it has kits…”

Amir’s eyes follow Evan’s pointing finger. Slightly to the right of the fox, behind it a few feet, are four tiny foxes.

“Ohhh…”

“She must be moving them,” Evan whispers. “We should leave her alone.”

Another kit pops its head out from a bush, making five. The mother fox keeps gazing at them, her tufted ears pricked, her alert face suspicious.

Evan tugs Amir’s sleeve, pulling him back down the trail; Amir stares after the tiny foxes, which are gazing bobble-headed after him.

“Bye babies,” he says.

“They’re cute, aren’t they?” Evan says.

“Yeah.”

They walk without talking for a few minutes, crunching through dead leaves as Evan consults his compass.

For some reason, Amir keeps thinking of the first time they had sex. Probably because they’d run away to the woods for it, around this same time of year, around his birthday. They were afraid of getting caught doing it at home, so they told their parents they were going on a weekend fishing trip (in retrospect, Louis totally knew what was up) then drove up to Los Padres and rented an AirBnb.

It was nice and gentle. Evan sucked, because he was so nervous, but Amir didn’t care. In fact, he liked that Evan was nervous. It felt real, and genuine, and sweet. They laughed a lot, and made hot chocolate after.

“By the way, I don’t know if I want to tour,” Amir says, breaking the silence. “I’ve never done it. I might hate it.”

“You wouldn’t,” Evan says. “You want to see the world, you want to go all over the place, and meet people who feel the same way about music as you do… I know you, that’s exactly what you want.”

“Yeah,” Amir admits, “but I like being home, too. I get anxious when I’m away too long.”

“I’m just saying.”

Amir falls quiet, and his voice is replaced by the sound of the forest: crickets, a creek babbling nearby, the distant calls of birds.

“It wouldn’t be like it was last time we were apart,” Evan finally says. “If we had to do long-distance again. I was being dumb, I kind of ghosted. It’d be different.”

Amir is relieved to hear him finally admit to ghosting. He wants to beg him not to leave his side at all, but that wouldn’t be fair. Evan can’t be his lapdog.

God, he wishes Evan were a musician, or wanted to work in A&R or do music marketing or something, anything that would allow him to fold neatly into Amir’s life. But Amir wouldn’t love him as much if he weren’t his own person, if there weren’t that earnest and earthy part of him that yearns to return to the woods, to always feel the sun on his face.

His dads tell him to just enjoy good things while he has them and not worry so much about the future, but that’s always sounded like nonsense to him. These days, Amir thinks about nothing but the future, and it doesn’t make sense to not fight like hell to get and keep every single thing you want. What’s the point of life, otherwise?

He reaches out for Evan’s hand and laces his fingers in his. Evan squeezes him, and they swing their hands back and forth for a moment like little kids.

“Are we stopping by the camp on our way down?” Amir says.

“Yeah,” Evan says. “We can say hi and stuff.”

“You think they have Advil?”

Evan stops. “ _I_ have Advil,” he says, slinging his backpack off his shoulder and digging through a pocket.

Amir watches him. “That’s serious preparation.”

“Boy Scouts motto,” Evan says, passing him a pill packet and a water bottle.

“You weren’t a Boy Scout.”

“I wasn’t, but I’m always kind of expecting you to fall off a mountain,” Evan says, then laughs when Amir hits him in the shoulder. “Wanna talk about your birthday?”

“Yes, always.”

“Okay, so, Greg and Jordan want to throw a party in your apartment —”

“‘Course.”

“Right, but I convinced them it’s too small in there, and we should do it at a club instead.”

Amir swallows the Advil and hands Evan the water back. “Smart. I can get us a lounge for the night, and bottle service.”

“That’s not too much cash?”

“My dads are gonna splash out for my birthday this year,” Amir says. “I can already tell. Plus, I made like a grand my last session fee, so I can honestly probably cover all that stuff myself.”

“A grand? Holy shit,” Evan says. “How many hours of work?”

“About six,” Amir says.

“That’s like — fuck, two hundred bucks an hour?”

Amir does the math. “It’s, ah… hang on. A hundred and sixty-six.”

“Still,” Evan says.

He laughs. “It was one of Liam’s friends, so I’m pretty sure he gave me a jacked-up fee as a favor to him, but whatever.”

Evan wraps an arm around him, bringing him in close and ruffling his hair. “Honestly, I just didn’t know music was money like that,” he says admiringly. “That’s ten times what I make an hour.”

“Yeah, but you’re trying to save the world.”

“Trying,” Evan agrees.

Amir smiles at him. “I’ll subsidize your lifestyle. It’s like an investment.”

“So you’re like my sugar daddy, huh?”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“Okay, dick,” Evan says, laughing, and lets him go before picking up speed down the path.

“No!” Amir jogs after him, grabbing his arm and wrapping it firmly back around his own shoulders. “Don’t leave me, I’m injured. You’re the dick, dick.”

Evan slows his pace back down, and leans in to kiss Amir’s head.


	5. amir and evan part ii

LONDON, AUGUST 10, 2039

“And of course,” William Bernet continues, clapping his hands together as he crosses the stage of the lecture hall back to his podium, “all thirteen of you are classically trained pianists. And all of you are jazz musicians. So, always, your improvisational mind is fighting decades of repetitive practice.”

Amir leans forward in his auditorium seat a little bit, wanting a better view. He’s obsessed with Bernet, whose seminal 2022 album _Coastal_ has influenced Amir’s style of play more than anyone has since Thelonius Monk himself. When he heard that Bernet was delivering the final lecture to the recipients of the Royal Academy of Music’s summer fellowship for emerging British jazz pianists, he yelled “Oh SHIT!” so loudly that his roommate came to check on him.

“We’re not getting quizzed at the end,” his friend Teddy mutters to him.

Amir laughs. “Shut up.”

Teddy is essentially the only friend he’s made here; the other five pianists are vocal about their conviction that his (recently earned) dual citizenship doesn’t make him British enough to be here, and that he only got accepted to the program because his parents and step-parents are famous Brits, and any displays of genuine talent on his part only seem to make them like him less. Amir took this to heart at first and spent his first few weeks in London having one long anxiety attack, until Teddy found him after a particularly vicious critique session and offered solidarity.

“They’re stuck-up, jealous cunts,” she told him in her thick Scouse accent. “They really are. You’re just going to have to ignore them the rest of the summer. But listen, they don’t want me here, either, ‘cos I’m not posh, and _I_ don’t give a shit.”

Amir, who was perched crying on the windowsill in the toilet, blinked tearfully at her. She had banged the door down and cornered him without warning. “You know you’re in the men’s room?”

She laughed at him. “Who cares? C’mon. Slap some water on your face and get up. Let’s go get a drink or something.”

He liked Teddy a lot; she reminded him equally of Mia and Toni. They got a drink, and many more over the next few months, and exchanged many text messages underneath tables mocking the other pianists in their cohort. They even played a few open mic nights together at little local pubs. He learned that Teddy’s a fantastically talented improvisational pianist with a big voice that can blow down a crowd, like Amy Winehouse, and has already put out two albums through a small label, which made Amir feel kind of behind on things. By the end they’d become quite good friends; she’s his best friend in the entire U.K., besides his cousin Raza. He’s going to miss her when he goes back to the states, but they’re bound to run into each other throughout their careers.

Plus, now he gets to be back with Evan for good. Evan’s been in London since last night, staying in Amir’s little flat with him while his roommate is out of the country, and they’ve been out of their minds happy. Amir wasn’t prepared for the kind of non-stop, absolutely pathetic missing he’d be doing; he missed him the way you can only miss someone when you’re young and far from home, and you’ve been sleeping with them since you were a teenager.

But it’s over now. Amir has a bachelor’s of music in jazz, and Evan has a dual associate’s of applied science in forestry and environmental studies, and now they can go and do whatever the fuck they want. Amir’s racked up experience in Juilliard's orchestras and jazz ensembles, in the bands he’s played in and the thankless work he’s done as a session artist, and now as a handpicked fellow learning under some of the most talented pianists in the world. He’s ready.

And Evan can work anywhere, right? There’s always a forest or an animal that needs saving, especially right now as climate change is being held only tenuously at bay. If Amir has to go to Bavaria to play in an orchestra, then Evan can save some Bavarian monkey from extinction, or help plant Bavarian trees, whatever.

That’s what Amir has on his mind after the lecture has ended, and he says a quick bye to Teddy so he can slip down the auditorium stairs and approach William, who’s struggling with the zipper on his tablet’s soft case.

“Mr. Bernet?” he says, tentatively. William is intimidating up close; he’s tall and solidly built, radiating both gravitas and warmth. He’s wearing glasses that are catching the bright lights and obscuring his eyes, and he’s surprisingly handsome in person.

William looks up. “Hi there,” he says, breaking into a smile. “Are you a wizard with zippers, by chance?”

“I can give it a try,” Amir says, with a breathless laugh. He takes the case and starts yanking on the zipper; he manages to get it to cooperate through sheer willpower, then quickly hands it back. God, his hands are clammy.

“Ah, brilliant, thank you. So what’s on your mind?” William says. “Any questions about the lecture? I hope I didn’t put you all to sleep. I know you must be exhausted... you just turned in and performed your final compositions, right?”

“Yeah, yesterday — but no, you definitely didn’t put me to sleep,” Amir says, even more breathless than before. William is looking directly at him, now, and his gut is aflame. “You could never — I mean, you’re like — you could never. You’re one of my favorite pianists, like, ever, who ever lived, I think you’re a genius.”

He smiles. “Thank you, that’s very kind.”

“I mean it,” Amir says, trying not to quiver from receiving the smile. “I don’t usually say stuff like that.”

”Are you our one American in the program, our quasi-Brit?” William says, his eyes twinkling. “I thought you were, but I’m hearing some slightly British pronunciations.”

Amir’s face gets hot. “I do that sometimes when I’m here a whole summer. It just sneaks in.”

“Well, a summer in London can do strange things to us. So does that make you Amir, then? Son of One Direction?”

“Yeah.”

“I admit, I was curious when I saw your name on the roster. That must be a strange legacy to carry, as a musician.”

“I don’t think about it much,” Amir lies.

William nods. Behind them, the theater door clicks shut behind the last departing student.

“Could be a help,” he says. “Could be a harm, too. Doesn’t matter in the end, we all just play the cards we’re dealt.”

“Right,” Amir says, relieved to hear this.

William’s eyes twinkle. “Do you love jazz?”

“So much, yeah. I’m crazy about it.”

“Then you’ll be fine.” William extends a hand to him, and Amir breathlessly shakes it. “I’m sorry, I have to get going to a meeting. But I want to wish you luck. Look, it’s a wonderful gift we have, to do the thing we’re crazy about. Don’t ever take it for granted.”

Dizzy, Amir nods up at him. “Thanks,” he manages. “I won’t.”

*

Louis calls Amir when he’s getting off the Tube and walking back to his little flat, sweatily winding his way through the cobblestone London streets.

Amir hates this walk. It’s been about 90% humidity all summer, and all the streets around his flat look the same, so he keeps getting lost. When he first got here, he rented a moped to get around with, but he quickly figured out that there’s so much traffic in London that he could get to the university faster by walking. Which was a bummer, because he’s convinced that he looked pretty cool on the moped.

He shakes his watch at his earbuds to pick up the call. “Yo.”

Louis has been on tour all summer, so they haven’t had the chance to talk much, and Amir figures that’s why he’s reaching out. He did get to see his dad briefly at a tour date in London, which was fun, although it wasn’t really a father-son type of interaction. Louis wrapped Amir in a huge hug when he came backstage, then got sucked back into chatting with his band and entourage, and let them drag him off to go party.

Amir felt a little snubbed, but not by much. If anything, the older kids are just relieved that he’s finally doing something that’s been a dream of his for as long as they can remember. Mia says that the twins have been a little sulky in his absence, but they’re only fourteen. Amir remembers how mad he got around that age when Zayn took Harry and the girls on tour with him, and left his only son at home to toil miserably away in Algebra II with a bunch of older kids, who all teased him because he’d skipped ahead two grades in math before his voice had dropped.

“Hi hi,” Louis says. “How are you? How was your last day?”

“Really good,” Amir says, dodging a cyclist and nearly falling over into someone’s garden. “I got to talk to William Bernet.”

“Huh,” Louis says. “That good?”

“Yeah, Dad! You know who he is, I had a poster of him at the old house.”

“You had loads of posters, love,” Louis says, laughing. “I’m excited for you, though, I want to hear all about your summer when I see you. Listen, sorry to switch topics, but the reason I called is something sort of lucky happened. But it’s sort of bad, too. Not for us, though. A bit bad for me, maybe, but good for you?”

Amir slows down, breathing hard in the soggy air. He stops, full of nerves, and reaches for a fat pink rose that’s dangling over the wrought-iron fence he’s walking along. He rubs one silky petal between his fingertips. “What is it?”

“Well, you remember Kosmonauta?”

“They’re one of the bands you manage? Pop rock?”

“Yeah, that’s them. Their keyboardist, Danny, is a co-vocalist with Hec, who’s their lead guitarist. And Danny’s just gone into rehab last night. And they’re on tour, right now.”

“Oh shit.”

“Yeah. So. Thankfully, they were wrapping up, and they were able to cancel the last few dates. But they’ve got this gig at the Troubadour in a few days, and they’ve got a ton of fans and some press coming to that, so they don’t want to cancel.”

Amir suddenly realizes what his dad’s about to ask him, and without meaning to, yanks the rose from its stem. He squishes it hard in his fist. “You want me to fill in?”

“Only if you want to,” Louis says quickly. “I floated it as a suggestion last night, just ‘cos you’ll be back in the area, y’know? It’s Saturday night in L.A., and I’m gonna be down there as well, for the last date of me tour tomorrow. I’ve actually got a charity event Saturday evening, so I don’t think I’d make it in time to see you, but I’ll be in the city. We could get a beer after, and talk about it. Maybe Zayn can come? Dunno what he’s up to. Anyway, I told the band last night that I’d call you first thing in the morning.”

“Um,” Amir says, dazed by the amount of information he’s getting. “I — sure. I can do it.”

“Thanks so much, love. I mean, it’s a great opportunity for you as well, of course, to perform in front of a big crowd and all that press. But it’s a huge help to them, and they appreciate it. _I_ appreciate it, as their manager.”

 _Big crowd_ makes the back of Amir’s neck tingle. “Yeah, sure, I’m glad to help.”

“And playing a more mainstream genre like this, it’s a good chance to show your talents in a different way.”

“No offense to Kosmonauta, Dad, but I don’t think I’m going to fall in love with their sound or anything.”

“Right, no, I know, but it never hurts to experiment a bit. Listen, lemme call them and tell them you said yes, and I’ll send you the details, and then I’ll see you in L.A. in a couple days. You can tell me all about London.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“Love you.”

“Love you. Bye.”

Amir hangs up, suddenly anxious. He continues walking through the hazy heat, tossing the now-pulverized lump of rose petals into the gutter.

*

Amir is in a weird mood when he gets back to the apartment, and Evan can’t tell why. He’s humming with energy and sort of dreamy-eyed the way he gets sometimes, but he doesn’t announce any news or anything, just gives Evan a big kiss hello and tells him to put some pants on, because they’re going out to a pub.

They don’t talk on the walk over, either; they keep stopping so they can make out. Evan’s so happy to see him, he doesn’t even care when people bump into them or make annoyed noises about them being in the way. When they reach the bar, Evan presses him up against the brick wall outside it and flicks his tongue in his ear. Amir wiggles underneath him and laughs low in his throat, his hand squeezing Evan’s bicep.

Somehow they make it inside and get a seat at the bar, still mussed and smiling lasciviously at each other. Then they order beers, and halfway into their first, they start to calm down a little.

“I’ve actually never been here before,” Amir says. “Teddy recommended it, she knows all these random places in London, she’s friends with all the bartenders. Some of the appetizers sound good… I dunno, I’m not that hungry, are you?” He must be anxious about something, to be babbling like this.

“I could eat,” Evan says. “I walked around a lot today.”

Amir nods, still looking at the menu. A piece of his dark hair falls into his eyes, and Evan reaches over to smooth it back.

He’s mostly used to Amir’s looks, since he’s known him for so long. He was only reminded about them when they got older and people started acting weird about Amir: making friends with Evan just to get to him, bringing him up in conversation out of nowhere, following him around at parties. He’d watch them go mute in Amir’s presence, and he’d remember — oh, right.

This bugged Jason, who was insecure and jealous, but Evan never minded it until he started getting feelings for Amir at the end of their junior year. Suddenly looking directly at his delicately handsome face was hard in a way it had never been before. He felt weird around him when they’d jump in the pool, weird noticing the lines of his slim body and the tawny glow of his skin, dark flashes of armpit hair. It didn’t help that Amir was as mindlessly flirty with him as ever, flopping into his lap when they smoked weed or tackling him onto the football field when they had to run laps in gym.

When they actually started dating, it got easier to look at him, but whenever they spend time apart and he forgets Amir’s face it gets hard again. Right now it’s hard. Evan can’t seem to stop staring, though; his eyes are dragged magnetically back to Amir whenever he tries to glance away at the TVs behind the bar, or the bartender rinsing out pint glasses, or the group of yuppies having a raucous conversation about soccer (football) a few seats down from them.

It isn’t even a lustful stare — more of an unthinking one, like when he’s hiking and his eyes are continually drawn to the horizon. There’s something mathematically sound about Amir, in the straight lines of his nose and cheekbones, in the parabola of his long eyelashes. He looks at harmony with the universe.

Amir’s nose twitches, and he gives Evan an amused sideways look. “What?”

“Nothing,” Evan says, smiling back at him. “Your little accent is funny.”

Amir groans. “It’s not an accent!”

“Right there. _Aaaa_ ccent.”

“I don’t know what you want from me,” Amir says, laughing. “Mia does the same thing. What do I even say wrong, besides that?”

“Just now, you were saying ‘British’ funny,” Evan says. “Like, you make it go up in the middle? And you say panic like ‘paneck’. ‘Evan, help, I’m haveng a paneck attack.’”

Amir laughs harder at this.

“I mean, listening to your parents, I get it. Sometimes I still can’t understand Louis.”

“Honestly, there’s times l can’t understand Irish people. Scottish, either. Niall and his wife, when they call on Christmas, I’m just like, _What? What?_ ” Amir plays with the label on his beer, peeling it off part way. “William Bernet pointed out how I was saying stuff. Did I tell you I got to talk to him? I just walked up after his talk and said hi.”

“No way! You love that guy.”

“I know,” Amir says, with a sort of dreamy-eyed smile. “He was so cool in person, too. Like, classy.”

Evan laughs. “What, you have a crush on him now?”

“No, nah, it’s not like that.”

“Meer, I don’t care if you have a crush on some old guy.”

“He’s not _that_ old! He’s like forty-five. You’re just jealous.”

“So you do have a crush on him.”

“I just really respect him as a musician,” Amir hedges.

Evan’s about to deliver a comeback when a hand lands on his shoulder, making him jump.

“Sorry,” says the guy the hand belongs to, with a soft chuckle. Evan looks up at him. He’s dressed in plain businessman attire, but Evan grew up rich, and he knows luxury when he sees it. This guy’s clothes, coat and watch tell Evan he’s a serious player, maybe even a billionaire. “Evan? Evan Stewart?”

“Yeah,” Evan says with some trepidation. He flicks his eyes to Amir, who looks confused.

“I’m Rowan Birch,” the guy says. “I’m a friend of your dad’s, you might remember me from when you were a kid…”

Of course. Evan recognizes him now. The Birch family are old-money Brits who got made a killing on land deals in Saudi Arabia, then staged a hostile takeover of News Corp and robbed the company out from under the fractured Murdoch family. They’re absolutely notorious in the tiny world of media conglomerates. Evan’s dad Carter sees the Birches equally as allies and threats.

“Oh, hey,” Evan says, shaking his hand. “Good to see you. Sorry I didn’t recognize you.”

“Not to worry,” Rowan says. “I hardly recognized you, myself. You’re not still out of the mix, are you?”

Evan gets prickles on the back of his neck. Rowan’s smile is friendly, but his dark eyes are not. Evan wonders if he’ll report this meeting back to Carter.

“Nah, I am, yeah,” he says. “Just doing my own thing.”

“Fascinating,” Rowan says. “The heir to a six billion dollar company, but you’re just… doing your own thing? Almost hard to believe.”

The prickles turn to chills. He gets lost for a millisecond in the terrifying black depths of Rowan’s fishy eyes.

“I don’t know what to tell you, man,” Evan says.

Rowan laughs and squeezes his shoulder. “Good to see you,” he says, and walks away through the crowd, toward the exit. The bells over the door ring out as he pushes through it.

Amir leans in close. “The fuck was that?” he whispers.

“I dunno,” Evan admits. “He does, um. Spy on me, sometimes...”

“Who? That guy?”

“No, no. My dad. He has like, a company PI who keeps track of me, and stuff.”

“ _What?_ ”

“Yeah, it’s a pretty new thing.”

“But who was that guy?”

“A friend of his,” Evan says. “The British version of my dad, basically. So it’s weird that he’d be here, in a random pub…”

“You think your dad asked him to, what, find you and check up on you?”

“I dunno,” Evan says again. “It could be a coincidence, he could’ve seen me from the street.”

“And just walked in to trash talk you?” Amir sounds angry on his behalf, now. Evan doesn’t get angry that often, so he appreciates when Amir does it for him. “These people are all so weird... I don’t even get, like, why they can’t just let you be.”

Evan shrugs. “Everyone thought I’d be the heir to the company.”

“Why not your sister, though? She’s older.”

“It’s just how it is,” Evan says. “My dad’s old-fashioned, he thinks it goes to the firstborn son, or at least whoever’s going to pass on the family name. Plus, I mean, she’s on the board, now, but she doesn’t want to be chairman, and definitely not CEO. Henry’s the only one of us who wants to be, but he’s also the biggest liability.”

“So if she doesn’t want to be CEO, either, why do your parents give _you_ so much shit?”

Evan stares down at his beer and then drains the rest of it, flagging the bartender. “Can I get a shot of Jameson?” he says to him.

The bartender nods and turns to the row of liquor bottles.

“She still plays the game,” Evan says. “Her husband’s a congressman. He might be the governor of New York in fifteen years. She’s on the board, she basically runs events at the Met. She’s friends with the kids of all my parents’ friends. She wears Chanel. And she’s my parents’ favorite.”

Amir rolls his eyes at this. “Chanel’s ugly anyway.”

“My dad freaks out the longer I stay out of the company. I think he’s really starting to realize he might not be able to suck me back in.” Evan clears his throat. “And he thinks it’s your fault.”

A shot of Jameson is plopped down in front of him. He shoots it.

“I know,” Amir says unhappily.

“They wanted me to come to the Hamptons with them this summer.” Evan says, coughing away the burn of the alcohol. “They’re there right now. He wants to get me away from you so he can work on me, y’know, manipulate me. Not into taking over, I think he’s like, come to terms with the fact that it’s gonna be Henry, but into taking a board seat or something.”

“Wait, really?”

“I’m still his son,” Evan says. “He wants the company’s power in family hands. It’s this ruling class shit. That’s why he paid for SUNY, he was indulging me. That’s what him and my mom do, it’s either a bribe or excommunication.”

“You want another shot?” Amir says.

Evan laughs. “Sure.”

Amir flags the bartender. “D’you think he’s okay with the fact that he ended up with Henry for CEO, instead of you?”

“I guess. I dunno. It’s — he’d call it suboptimal, that’s his word _._ Henry has a good head for business and stuff, definitely better than mine, but he’s, uh. You know how he is.”

“The kind of guy who kills hobos,” Amir says.

Evan snorts. “I mean. Yeah. I’m, uh. My dad thought I’d be easier to push around, keep in line, I guess. When I was a kid, I always just kind of did whatever anyone told me to do. I was gullible.”

“You got yourself kicked out of Groton,” Amir points out.

“He didn’t know I wanted to get kicked out. They though that was me being dumb, not me rebelling against the whole, y’know… Groton to Stanford to CEO pipeline.”

“And now you’re rebelling for real.”

“Exactly. That’s why he’s freaked out, that’s why I’m such a disappointment.”

Amir reaches up and strokes his hair back from his face.

“I’m fine,” Evan assures him, even though his touch feels nice.

“Okay.”

“Let’s talk about something else.” Evan spins his empty beer bottle in a circle on the bar. “Tell me why you were so hyper when you got back to the apartment.”

“Oh. Uh...” Amir shifts in his seat. “Well, first, I’ve been thinking —“

A drunk guy bumps into them, then, and spills his beer. Even though it goes on the floor and neither of them, he spends like half a minute apologizing before they can finally send him on his way.

Evan’s starting to feel drunk, himself. There’s a buzzing behind his forehead, and he feels loose in his seat. Another shot appears in front of him, and he shoots it.

“Thinking?” he says, realizing Amir never finished his sentence.

“Yeah, uh…” Amir has a new beer in front of him, and he takes a long sip. “We haven’t really talked about it, what you’re gonna be doing in the fall.”

“Oh.” Evan feels a lurch of queasiness from the shot hitting his stomach, and swallows. “Looking for jobs. I’ve been in touch with a couple national parks and conservatories, all in California. I dunno… what are you gonna be doing?”

Amir shrugs. “Trying to record an album, I guess.”

“Okay, so you’d want home base to be close to your dad, right? He’s your manager?”

“We haven’t officially decided that, but yeah.”

“So… we get a place together in California, I guess.”

Evan’s looking forward to living with Amir again, and to living in an actual home — he’s spent the last year on his park ranger apprenticeship, living in a barracks with five other guys, driving down on weekends to see Amir in the city up until Amir graduated and flew to London for his fellowship.

“And you get a job at, what, Yosemite?” Amir says.

“Wherever. There’s a ton of places near Sacramento — San Pablo Bay, Grizzly Island, Mendocino, Tahoe, Eldorado, Stanislaus, and yeah, Yosemite. Research centers, wildlife conservation, national parks, it’s a great area for that.”

“What about if I join a touring band, or go on tour myself, or get hired to back up a soloist?” Amir says. “Or if I want to live in New Orleans for a while, or something? Or I get another fellowship, or a residency, or something?”

“We’ll talk about that as it comes,” Evan says, shrugging.

“But you want to tie yourself down long-term, right away?” Amir says. “You don’t want to like, wait to see what’s gonna be happening with me before you take a job somewhere?”

“Amir… I don’t want to just be your boyfriend tagging along with you while all these music industry types look me up and down like I’m not there, and hit on you when I’m standing right next to you, no. I’m trying to have a career on my own merit, trying to save the planet —“

“Evan, I know, but come on...”

“I take this shit seriously,” Evan says. “I’ve given up a lot. You get that, right? You’ve been with me this whole way. You know what I’m giving up.”

“I know,” Amir sighs, then tosses a crumpled pair of twenties on the bar. As he moves, he flashes the new tattoo on the inside of his left forearm: _et in pulverem reverteris._

“We’re closing out,” Amir says loudly, and the bartender turns around.

“You want a receipt, mate?” the bartender says, collecting up the twenties. “Or change?”

Amir chugs the rest of his beer and wipes his lip. “No, keep it,” he says, then grabs Evan by the sleeve. “Let’s take a walk.”

They push past the throngs of drunk Brits and step outside, into night air that’s just as soupy as it was in the daytime. Amir veers right and starts heading decisively in that direction, so Evan chases after him.

“Where are we going?” he says, once he’s caught up.

“River,” Amir says. “It’s a little less hot there, and we’re near the footbridge.” He rolls up the sleeves on his black t-shirt, then says, “Would you take a board seat, if your dad asked?”

“Um,” Evan says, surprised by the question. “Maybe. It’d depend. If I thought I could do something good with it, I might.”

“Like fight your dad’s agenda?”

“Yeah. I’d have voting power, and it’d be hard for them to get rid of me. But he might be anticipating that exact thing.”

Amir slips a joint out of his pocket, then stops to light it with a matchbook from the bar they just left. Two girls in heavy makeup walk by, giving him a leer; Evan must look perturbed by this, because the taller one says, “He yours, love?”

“Yeah,” Evan turns to call after her.

“Lucky,” the other one says, lifting her eyebrows. “And you’re cute, too. Fancy a foursome?”

“Gina!” her friend giggles.

Amir appears to ignore all of this; as their giggles fade away down the street, he blows acrid smoke out at Evan before handing him the joint.

Evan reaches out to take his free hand, and they walk down the long streets together in silence. It’s still early enough that there are hordes of people out, mostly young and mostly laughing. Evan’s kind of jealous of them. He wants so much to be a carefree 20-something. He was carefree his whole life, and then when he finally got out from under his parents’ thumbs, he lost the ability to be.

It starts to rain, but so gently that they aren’t bothered by it. It’s more of a mist, really. It actually feels good, although it makes the streetlights above them glow and smear painfully in Evan’s peripheral vision, since he doesn’t have his contacts in.

After a few minutes of walking toward the Thames (Evan can tell they’re getting closer, as the river smell is getting stronger in his nostrils) Amir says, “My dad gave me a gig filling in for a band he manages.”

“Oh, shit,” Evan says. “That’s cool. What does filling in mean?”

“They have a performance in L.A. this week,” Amir says, lifting the joint to take a drag, then offering the roach to Evan. “They lost their keyboardist and co-lead singer.”

“Lost him?”

“He’s in rehab.”

“Oh shit.”

“I remember my dad talking about this a couple weeks ago.” Amir reaches over and grabs Evan around the forearm, running his fingers against the grain and making the hair there stand on end. “The band was on the verge of breaking up, but he talked them down. He said there was a time in One Direction, when he was, like, my age, and they were all fighting and doing coke… he said it helped him know what to say, ‘cos he’d been there.”

They stop at a crosswalk, and Amir points up, indicating a spire that rises over the tops of the buildings ahead of them. “St. Paul’s Cathedral,” he says, more to himself than to Evan.

“It’s wild your dad tells you about stuff like that,” Evan says.

“I think he thinks it’ll keep us from repeating their mistakes,” Amir says. He definitely sounds drunk, now; there’s a stubbornly blunted quality to his speech, and he’s slurring. “But I dunno. Sometimes I’d rather not know, y’know? Would you want to know that stuff, about your parents?”

Evan laughs. “I already do, I just don’t hear it straight from them the way you do.”

The light changes, and they cross, walking along a shadowed little side street between two rows of towering townhouses.

“I’m kind of nervous,” Amir says. “I feel like my career’s about to like, actually start.”

“I’ve been getting the same feeling,” Evan says.

“Really?”

He nods. Amir’s being courted more and more, lately — he spent his senior year at Juilliard in the studio constantly, playing as a session pianist on all kinds of tracks. Both Louis and Zayn had albums out last year, and Amir played improvisationally on both, which led to other people in the pop world seeking him out, which only made even _more_ people seek him out. Then he briefly joined a jazz trio called Leftfoot that got attention from NPR and Pitchfork.

That was really what got the ball rolling, because an NPR writer identified him as “a charismatic star in his own right, a clear heir to his pop prince parents,” underneath a moody studio portrait of him in a black turtleneck with his hair slicked back like he was posing for the cover of GQ.

Amir hasn’t been catapulted into the firmament quite yet, but he’s close. Invisible hands are starting to tug at him, pulling him loose from the undertow of his parents’ fame and sending him briefly up into the fresh air, like a dolphin.

It makes Evan anxious and insecure, but he’s really proud of Amir. It’s not like he hasn’t worked hard for this. All he’s done for the last year is work — to the point of burnout, panic attacks, long tearful meltdowns that Evan had to talk him through. He barely partied; he’d go to bed at nine some nights so he could wake up at five and play piano and guitar until his fingers were so stiff from tendonitis that he couldn’t use a doorknob. And it’s paying off, with the fellowship he got, and with the contract offers that will undoubtedly start pouring in once he finally announces he’s open to negotiations.

When Louis flew out one weekend to watch one of his gigs, Evan leaned over to him in the audience at the club and whispered, “Sometimes I’m afraid someone’s just gonna come and take him away.”

“I know,” Louis whispered back, not taking his eyes from Amir on the piano, his face shining with pride even as sadness tugged at his mouth. “I am too.”

Evan looks over at Amir now. He’s clearly lost in his own world, worrying at his lip with his teeth.

“Yeah,” Evan says. “I feel like it’s about to happen for you.”

“Then why won’t you come with me?” Amir says, turning to him beseechingly. “Why won’t you just say, yeah, I’ll put off my conservation stuff for a couple years, and we can travel together, do whatever?”

“That’s not fair, you know it’s not,” Evan says.

“How is it not fair? You can do this whenever!”

“How can it wait? You think climate change can wait? You think mass extinction can wait?”

“But you can help from the road! You can — listen, ask my dad for an investment, okay, and start like a task force or something, and you can oversee them while you’re with me, and then you’d be doing a lot of good, but we could be together —“

“I don’t even know what we’re talking about, here,” Evan says in frustration. “‘Cos my path is pretty clear-cut, but I have no idea what you’ll be doing this time next year. I can’t promise to be with you, ‘cos even you can’t tell me where you’re going.”

Amir drops his hand, which isn’t a good sign.

“Your path isn’t clear-cut,” he says. “There’s so many things you could do with your degree. And you have all this shit with your family that’s still up in the air.”

Evan ignores this. “Look, why can’t you stay in California for a while? Why can’t we like, spend time actually living together, no roommates, in a little place, and just get to be together for once? You can travel if you have to —“

“I will have to,” Amir snaps. “I’m going to have to. Evan, we’re twenty-two. Why do you not, like, want to see the world? Why don’t you just want to have an adventure with me first? We can get a little place together whenever! We can do that when we’re thirty! I want to play in New Orleans, and Amsterdam, and London, I want to play wherever I get asked to go play! But I don’t want to go alone. I don’t want to go without you.”

Evan is quiet for a while. They come out from a sidestreet, and there’s the Thames, and cars rushing by on the busy A road in front of it.

Amir takes his hand again, like he always does when they’re around traffic. It’s cute.

“I don’t fit in with that crowd of yours,” Evan finally says. He didn’t want to say it, but it’s apparent he’s going to have to scalpel himself open to get Amir to understand his point of view here. “I’d feel like a fucking idiot if I went on tour with you, honestly.”

“Why?” Amir says, looking up at him. “You’re cool.”

“I was cool in high school, okay? I’m not Hollywood cool. I didn’t grow up around cool, loose famous people like you did. I grew up with uptight rich people. I don’t know how to _be_ , when I’m around these people, and you’re always so comfortable with them. They barely pay attention to me.”

The light changes, and they cross, heading toward the bluish white glow of the lit-up Millennium bridge ahead of them. It stretches and twirls over the dark Thames. Evan can see a few people walking along it, one person biking.

“But my friends like you,” Amir argues. They reach the sidewalk, and Evan blinks again as the streetlights undulate in his eyes. “My bandmates like you. Everyone likes you, I don’t get what you’re saying. What crowd?”

“When you played piano for that guy Harry’s friends with, and we went to his house party, and all those label guys were there — like, the big time guys,” Evan says, stopping in his tracks and making Amir stop, too. “They didn’t like me, okay? Those kinds of guys don’t like me. You didn’t even notice, but they were fucking with me all night. And those are the kind of guys you’d have all around you if you went on tour, or joined a band, or something.”

“They don’t like you ‘cos they’re fake,” Amir exclaims. A cool breeze off the river hits them, mussing Evan’s short-cropped hair and blowing Amir’s longer hair around comically. They’re both damp from the misting rain. “You’re real, the stuff you care about is real, and they don’t get that, or like it — so _what?_ Who cares what they think?”

“I can’t stand being around that, though! All day, with guys like that whispering in your ear, telling you you’re great but you should rethink being so serious about me —“

“Evan, I love you!” Amir screams at him. “Why am I always on trial? Why can’t you just believe that?”

“‘Cos I wouldn’t pick me if I were you! I wouldn’t — if I was on my way to becoming some big fuck you rock star, I’d be fucking everybody! I’d fuck all the groupies and the, like — whoever!”

“I don’t want to fuck anybody I don’t care about anymore!” Amir yells. “I told you, I _tried_ that, it was horrible! Why don’t you believe that?”

“Honestly, the fact that you tried it makes me worried, alright! Especially when everyone’s already throwing themselves at you!”

Amir throws his hands up. “That is so like you to finally mention that bothered you, what, three _years_ later? Yeah, fine, I admit it, I’m an easy fuck! But I’m hard to deal with in every other way! And you’re the only one who’s ever really tried! Do you really think that means nothing to me? It means everything!”

An older woman walks by them, walking her Dalmatian. Evan glances at her without meaning to, and she looks very fixedly down at her feet, hurrying along. “Sorry,” she mutters.

“You’re fine,” Amir says hoarsely. “We’re the ones screaming in the street.”

She laughs good-naturedly as she walks away.

Embarrassed, Evan starts off down the footbridge, trying to ignore the vertigo he feels at being semi-transparently suspended over a rushing river. About a hundred feet out, he’s stopped by Amir tugging on his sleeve.

“Evan,” Amir says, in a small voice that breaks his resolve. “You know how much I love you. I just want us to be together and take care of each other. That’s all I want.”

Evan stops, then sits, leaning against the glowing glass railing. It squeaks wetly underneath his shirt. Amir kneels next to him.

“I hate doing this stuff in public,” Evan whispers. “I don’t even like doing it at all.”

“I know.”

“I’m tired of having this same argument.”

“I am too.” Amir’s quiet for a moment. “I’m not a cheater,” he adds, resentfully.

“I know you’re not.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“There’s just all these people who are gonna try to tear us apart,” Evan says, gazing at Amir’s face again. “They already try to, even. All these people who either, like, want to sleep with you, or want to get you away from me so they can get in your head and manipulate you. I know it seems like it’d be easier if I was always traveling with you, but it wouldn’t.”

He drags in a breath and hugs his knees to his chest, staring out at the glow of colorful lights on the water. Amir doesn’t say anything, just waits for him to finish.

“‘Cos if we were apart, you’d be able to miss me,” Evan says softly. “I’d be doing something important, you’d be able to think of me, like, as a grown man, as somebody you can respect. If I just chase you around the world… I’d smother you, and everyone around us would be trying to get rid of me, and trying to keep me out of rooms and discussions… you’d just lose respect for me.”

“I couldn’t,” Amir says, sounding heartbroken. “Evan, come on. That’s not… fuck, it kills me that you even think that. Nobody could ever change how I feel about you.”

“Everyone thinks that,” Evan says, feeling sick. “Everyone thinks how they feel is never gonna change. But I know feeling contempt for the other person is the worst thing for relationships. I don’t know a whole lot about relationships, but I know that.”

He’s seen it with his own parents, how his dad steadily developed contempt for his mom’s dependency on pills, how he resents her. How she resents him for his resentment.

“But if we’re apart from each other, then what?” Amir says. “What stops us from drifting, or forgetting how much we want this? Long distance is too hard. When we had to do it again this summer, it just sucked so much. I missed you all the time. My chest hurt all day long. I just hurt, like, everywhere. My throat, my heart, my gut, my dick, my balls.”

Evan chokes out a laugh, “Mine too.”

“I don’t think it’s as bad for you as it is for me,” Amir says, his face sour. “I don’t, ‘cos you’re always the one who’s willing to be apart.”

“It’s not that I’m willing,” Evan says. “It’s not like — I don’t _want_ to be away from you, I just know sometimes we have to be apart, and it’s okay. I don’t love you any less when I don’t see you every day. It worries me, honestly, that you think we have to be together to be okay.”

“Fuck off,” Amir says hotly. “Don’t turn this around on me. You’re bad at doing long-distance, and that’s what worries me about doing it. You don’t want to put the extra work in, you think it’s all just gonna be fine. Maybe for you it is, but not me.”

Evan sighs. He knows. Their second breakup had come about four months into his ranger apprenticeship, when he’d been doing an admittedly garbage job of responding to Amir’s texts or keeping up their FaceTime schedule. He was just really tired, but they had a huge blowout fight about it anyway, and didn’t talk for a week. Evan was the one who broke down and called him, begging to work it out. Amir agreed, and that was that, everything was okay again. Until now.

“It’s not ‘cos I don’t love you,” Evan says softly, reaching out for his hand. “It’s ‘cos I feel like I love you so much, I don’t even have to say it all the time.”

Amir lets out an emotional scoff. “You get, though, how that sounds like complete bullshit.”

“I know. But what do we do? How can we like…” Evan laughs, shrugging against the cold glass of the bridge railing. “What can we do to reassure each other we love each other, and like, we’re both in this for good? ‘Cos I’m out of ideas. I’m so tired of having this same fight with you.”

Amir’s face changes, and his brow knits. He stares off into space for a moment.

“What?” Evan says.

Amir’s gaze flicks back toward his, and he’s smiling big, his face alight with the joy of it, his catlike eyes glowing. “Let’s get married.”

It’s like being hit in the head with the boom of a boat.

“What?” Evan says again, his heart starting to pound, his mouth drying out.

“Let’s get married,” Amir repeats. “You want people to know I’m off the market, and you’re not to be fucked with, right? And I want to know we’ll be solid even if we have to spend some time apart. So let’s get married.”

Evan is still speechless, and Amir lifts his right hand, pointing to the promise band he wears. Evan has a matching one. “Why’d we get these? ‘Cos we said we want to do this someday, right? So why wait? Fuck it, let’s do it now. Let’s elope, so our parents can’t give us shit about it.” He’s talking super fast, the words rushing out of him. “I want to, so bad, I just want to be married to you already.”

The look in his eyes is infectious, and his face is as bewitching as ever. Evan’s afraid to speak.

“I mean, how do you feel?” Amir says, looking unsure of himself for a moment.

“I — yes. Yeah. Of course I want to marry you. God.” His heart is so hot and large in his chest, he feels like he might puke. “I just — are you a hundred percent sure?”

“Yeah, I am,” Amir says. “I need you to get how serious I am.”

“I know you’re serious, Meer.”

“No, you don’t,” Amir says, the smile turning into an almost malevolent grin. “But you will.”

Evan starts laughing.

“There’s no escape from me,” Amir says, tackling him, trying to rub his armpit in Evan’s face as Evan wriggles helplessly underneath him. “Legally, you’ll have to take my shit, forever.”

“Nooo,” Evan cries.

A man walking by does a double take at them and says, “Come on, boys. Take this somewhere else.”

“We’re getting married!” Amir chirps delightedly.

“Really?” he says primly. “Do they let little children get married, now?”

Amir sits up, glaring open-mouthed at the man’s retreating back. “Holy shit,” he says. “British people are brutal.”

Evan laughs.

“So are we doing this?” Amir says, glancing back at him. His hair is a mess.

Evan searches himself for genuine doubts and finds very few. Of the few he has, they’re mostly about how his family’s going to react, and who really cares about that? He’s already a pariah.

“Yeah,” he says, grinning. “We’re doing this.”

“Right now? Tomorrow?”

His head is spinning. “Sure. Tomorrow.”

Amir shouts happily and tackles him again, but this time he leans in to kiss him. Evan wraps his arms tight around him, hugging his precious body close. He presses the palms of his hands to the sweaty fabric of Amir’s thin t-shirt, feeling the heat of his skin emanating through it, feeling his rabbit heart beat frantically against his ribs.

*

They get an Uber home and spend the entire trip Googling frantic questions, Amir sprawled out across Evan’s lap.

“So it looks like the easiest way is to do it in Vegas,” Amir says. “We can pre-register, and that makes it easier…”

“Is there a blood test?” Evan mutters. The self-driving Uber rolls to a stop at a yellow light, and someone behind them honks furiously. “I thought there was a blood test.”

“Apparently not in Nevada? Oh shit, but we do need a witness.”

“Jason,” Evan says. Amir cracks up. “No, I’m serious! He’s the only person I can think of who wouldn’t think we were fucking stupid for doing this...”

“He’s still gonna think we’re stupid,” Amir says. “It’s just we know he’s stupider, so he can’t say shit to us. No, I have to have Mia. I mean, we should invite Jason too, but Mia’s gonna kill me if I elope without her.”

Evan sets his phone on the seat and looks down at Amir, stroking his hair back with one finger. “You sure you don’t want to just wait and have a little ceremony with all your family there?”

“No,” Amir says firmly. “They’d try to talk us out of it, they wouldn’t get it. My dads would be all, _bluh bluh, we got married at twenty-whatever, and we’re divorced now, bluh._ Like they didn’t have a bunch of other problems. And _I’m_ not pregnant.”

“Fuck,” Evan says, his stomach dropping. “I didn’t even think about that, everyone’s gonna think you’re pregnant.”

“Whatever,” Amir scoffs. “They’ll figure it out when there’s no baby. I’ll bring Sunday too, if I’m bringing Mia. So, Sunday, Mia, and Jason?”

“Sounds good to me.”

“You don’t want to invite Rachel?” Amir says softly, eyeing him.

“No,” Evan says. “No one from my family, nobody who even knows my family. They wouldn’t try to convince me like your parents, they’d physically try to stop me. They’d have me committed or something.”

“Whoa, why?”

“No prenup.”

“But I’m a millionaire too!”

“Doesn’t matter.”

The car lurches to a stop at another yellow. Amir sits up and cuddles into Evan’s shoulder; Evan wraps an arm around him.

“Your family’s so much more fucked up than I ever realized, when we were younger,” Amir says.

Evan laughs. “Dude, same.”

They fall quiet, intertwining their hands. Evan leans into Amir’s neck, nuzzling him, smelling his familiar smell. He strokes his thumb up and down Amir’s ring finger.

“I haven’t been this excited in forever,” he murmurs into his hair. “I feel like a little kid.”

“Me too,” Amir says. “I’m not gonna be able to sleep tonight.”

“Sleep on the plane.”

“Shit, right, I have to buy our tickets. Fuck. They’re gonna cost like a trillion dollars, this short notice...”

Amir fumbles for his phone, and reality worms its way back into the Uber.

“We can leave at eight tomorrow,” he mutters after a moment. “I wanna get coffee with Teddy before I go, say bye to her.”

“Okay. If we leave here at eight, what time is it in Vegas when we land?”

“Eleven,” Amir replies instantly.

“Did you do that in your head?”

“Duh.”

SACRAMENTO, AUGUST 10, 2039

Mia’s just knocked the ball back upfield when the referee’s whistle tweets, one, two, three times.

“GAME,” the ref shouts, waving his flag.

Mia sighs with relief, then turns and high-fives with Virginia, the right midfield who stopped short next to her.

The sound of the bored announcer rings out through the almost entirely empty stadium: “That’s game, everybody… Sacramento SC has kept Nashville SC at bay, beating them one zip, with the only goal of the game scored by Sacramento’s right forward, Olivia Hollis.”

No one even reacts to this. It was an arduous, awful game played under a mid-August afternoon sun, with so many missed passes and confused plays that the girls on both teams started to feel like they’d forgotten how soccer works. The whole world seems tired today — the Sacramento skyline, visible over the rim of the stadium, looks hazy and wilted. There are only about ten fans in the stands, a pathetic turnout even for a women’s expansion team that’s only existed for five years.

They start to file off the turf field, wiping their sweaty faces with the hems of their jerseys, politely high-fiving with any opposition they pass on their way.

Mia reaches the sideline where the team tossed their water bottles and grabs hers, taking a long drink and then dumping the rest over her head.

Someone claps her on the back and whispers, “Nice game. I liked the aggression.”

Mia turns. It’s their goalie, Leslie, who she saved from a full-on assault by colliding with one of Nashville’s forwards so hard that she got a yellow card for it. Yeah, she was a little out of line, but she does think the forward milked it. She got the wind knocked out of her, is all, and she was back in the game ten minutes later.

Out of the corner of the eye, she sees that same forward is striding toward her with a pissy look.

“Shit,” Mia says, and Leslie turns.

The girl is coming over so furiously that other Sacramento players start turning, too, alerted by the angry thump of cleats. One of the Nashville players leans out of their post-game huddle and calls, “Carly, it’s not worth it!” in a Southern drawl.

Carly ignores her and stops dead in front of Mia, who squints up at her. The sun is directly to the right of Carly’s stupid angry head, and she’s significantly taller, probably 5’10 at the minimum. How annoying.

“I just wanted to let you know you’re a cheap, dirty player,” Carly spits in her face. “We would’ve had that goal if you didn’t foul me, and you know it. I’d worry about my level of play, if I were you.”

She turns to walk away, and Mia grabs her arm, her heart thumping with fury.

“Hey, newsflash, you lost,” she snaps. “Why don’t _you_ worry about fucking winning?”

Carly turns back to her, her eyes blazing. “You know what though? I don’t even care, ‘cos our next match is gonna be against a team that plays fair.”

“I play fair,” Mia says, shaking with adrenaline, her vision getting bright and tunneling on Carly’s stupid face. “Soccer has hits. Go play badminton if you’re so fragile.”

Carly lets out a nasty laugh. “You know what?”

“Hey, ladies,” the ref calls from down the sideline. He’s standing uneasily by the door to the locker rooms, his hand on the knob. “Let’s break it up, alright?”

“Yeah, what’s going on down there?” their coach, Kelly, shouts from her seat in the stands. Mia turns and glances up at her; she has her reading glasses on and her tablet in her hand. Probably she’s already started reviewing the game film; all their games are livestreamed on their website, to an audience of barely anyone. “Hit the showers, Sacramento!”

The few fans who are left in the bleachers downfield are standing up, craning their necks to see what’s going on. Mia hears whispers from her teammates, her name being repeated in hushed tones, someone’s gentle hand on her shoulder. But blood is thundering in her ears, and she won’t be happy until Carly is walking away with her tail between her legs.

“No, what?” she says to her, as if no one else had spoken.

Carly leans in close, so close that Mia can feel her hot breath on her neck, but she doesn’t recoil. “I think you’re a spoiled, washed-up rich girl who’s not that good at soccer, and you’re pissed off your daddy couldn’t buy your way onto anything better than the worst team in the league.”

Mia punches her in the left breast, prompting shouts from her teammates and a roar of anger from the opposing team, who all start flooding in to try and break this up. Carly and Mia knock them back with elbows and tackle each other to the turf, slapping and clawing at each other, trying to jam fingers in the other’s eyes and pull each other’s hair. Carly gets one good belt in with a fist that lands like a softball, cracking Mia right in the mouth and the tip of her nose. Mia rolls away, crying out in pain — and then the strong arms of her coach clamp onto her biceps and yank her up.

A circle of purple Nashville uniforms closes around the prone Carly, and some girls on the edges shoot glares at Mia as she’s dragged away.

Mia’s intoxicated by adrenaline. Her vision swims, and she can barely feel Kelly’s wrist clamped around her arm. “Wasn’b my fault,” she says thickly, through a mouthful of blood. “She proboked me.”

“Disperse, girls,” Kelly shouts over her shoulder. “Get your shit, hit the showers. Show’s over.”

Fans in the stands are laughing and jeering.

They reach the locker room door, which Kelly yanks open and shoves her through. “Get in there,” she says, pointing to her office.

Mia trudges past the lockers and benches, sniffling pathetically. She wants to cry, now, but that would just make Kelly angrier.

So she sits in silence on the little plastic chair across from Kelly’s desk and endures some very precise, very accurate criticism, of the kind that she’s been hearing her whole life. “Attitude problem.” “Sore loser, worse winner.” “Temper issues.” “Hothead.” She even gets a few threats of being fired, but she knows Kelly won’t do that. Mia (or more accurately Louis) is the only reason the team has a personal Adidas sponsorship.

That’s much of the undertone of this dressing-down, too: _don’t make us lose that fucking sponsorship._

“I’m sorry, Coach,” Mia finally says, when the tirade has worn itself to a close. “I let her get in my head. I know better than that.”

“I thought you had thicker skin than this, honestly,” Kelly says, pushing her glasses up into her hair. “Haven’t you been hearing worse shit than that your whole life?”

Mia hangs her head, staring down at her lap. Blood drips from her nose into her forearm.

“The only times I’ve seen you that mad, it was on behalf of a teammate, not yourself.”

Heat rushes to Mia’s throat. “I’m not at my best, lately,” she mutters.

“Yeah, I’ve been noticing that,” Kelly says. “Your playing is listless, you’re dragging ass. You’re not the player I remember watching when I came to games at UCLA. It’s bumming me out, kid. What can we do?”

“It’s partly my knee.”

“Yeah, and we rehab that as much as we can. But this isn’t a physical problem, it’s a mental one. You‘re psyching yourself out, Mia, you’ve lost your edge.”

Mia clears her throat. She doesn’t want to talk about it, about any of it. She just wants to go home. “So I’m not fired?” she says.

Kelly laughs. “No. Your contract is safe, for now.”

Her $31,000 a year contract. Yippee.

“But I’m suspending you for the next game,” she adds. “You’re not going to St. Louis with us next week. You can hang back, practice, try to get your mojo back.”

Mia wants to protest this, but she finds she doesn’t really even care. “Alright,” she says, wiping at her nose.

Her teammates are all gone when she walks out of the coach’s office, already showered and changed. Only one girl is still there — Katarina. She’s a pretty Russian immigrant with tanned olive skin and boyishly short blonde hair. Mia noticed her as soon as she joined the team, but she was still with Aya, then, so she did nothing other than notice.

Katarina is rinsing her grass-stained shin guards in one of the sinks by the showers. Mia sidles up to the sink beside her and wets a paper towel, twisting it into little curlicues that she stuffs into her bleeding nose.

“You took a nasty punch,” Katarina notes in her thick accent, meeting Mia’s eyes in the mirror. “Over a lame insult and a weak tit slap.”

“Wasn’t weak,” Mia mutters. “I hit her as hard as she hit me.”

“Was it worth it, though?”

Mia considers this. On a professional level, no, it was stupid. It made her look volatile, it made her coach mad, it made her teammates mad. The story will probably get leaked to TMZ and make her whole family look bad.

But on a physical level, she feels good. She likes when she has temporary pain, a fresh and raw hurt that can distract from the exhaustingly familiar ache in her knee. She likes feeling blood come out of her face. She likes adrenaline.

And she likes fights. She likes hitting people. It makes her feel alive and powerful.

“You didn’t even win that fight,” Katarina notes. “It got broken up.”

“What do you want?” Mia snaps, rounding on her. “Seriously. Why are you hassling me?”

Katarina shrugs. “I just think you’re better than that,” she says, and picks up her gym bag, then heads for the door.

“I’m not,” Mia screams after her, a little hysterically.

*

The drive back to Liam and Louis’ ranch always feels longer than it is. You leave the city, wending slowly through leafy, tree-lined suburbs, then the more hilly, scrubby exurbs with their McMansions, and then it’s all trees again. After about twenty-five minutes, there you are: a gate with stone columns and dilapidated stone fencing, almost hidden by the forest, like a little fairy hole.

Sacramento: city of trees. If she’s honest, she misses Los Angeles.

Mia reaches her arm out the window and swipes her watch against the electric panel, then uses the sleeve of her other arm to wipe dried blood from under her nose. The gate opens and retracts, and her car pulls forward onto the tree-lined gravel drive. A minute of driving later, the treeline opens up, and there’s the property: a massive stone house atop a hill in the center of it all, with stables close by on the left, and Liam’s greenhouse, chicken coops, and fishing pond scattered over the sprawling land to the right.

All surrounded by yet more trees, of course. The closest neighbor is several miles away, and you can’t hear anything out here. It creeps Mia out. College got her used to the comforting roar of planes taking off from LAX all night.

As her car passes by the horse paddocks, Mia peeks out at the evil gray horse that Liam continues to insist he’s going to tame. It’s just calmly eating grass. Probably trying to lull them all into a false sense of security.

Sunday’s two horses are here now, too, but they’re probably standing politely in their stalls eating 24-karat gold leaf hay, or whatever fancy show horses do.

Mia didn’t want to move back in with her family, originally. Having squeaked out her business degree with a 2.89 GPA, she spent months in a perfunctory job search, half-heartedly applying to business admin positions with non-profits while Aya went through the interminable process of applying for government clearances and waiting to be approved for polygraphs.

Mia thought that once Aya found a job, she’d just follow her wherever she had to go. But that process kept dragging out longer and longer, and then Mia got an offer of a year-long contract to play for a Sacramento NWSL expansion team. It wasn’t like the offer came without strings — Louis is a long-time brand ambassador for Adidas and beloved by them, and the company is willing to splash out big bucks to start breaking Nike’s stranglehold on U.S. soccer, one team at a time.

At first she lived in a crappy apartment with two of her teammates, waiting to move in with Aya, waiting for something, anything to happen. Then in December, Aya got a great offer from the Foreign Service, and suddenly Mia no longer fit into her future.

It made sense, though, in the end. Mia is no diplomat’s wife. She’s pretty and rich, but she’s also loutish, loud, louche. She can’t keep her mouth shut, can’t stop getting in fights, can’t get her life together or figure out what she wants to do with it.

Aya was kind about the breakup, or as kind as she could be. “Who knows?” she said. “I still love you, that hasn’t changed. Why don’t we keep in touch, and see where we both are in a few years?”

“I’ll have moved on by then, I promise,” Mia snapped at her, to put a wall up around the terrifying chasm of bad feelings that had opened inside her chest.

Aya took a breath before responding, in the tone of a disappointed teacher, “I wish you wouldn’t make this harder than it has to be.”

Mia didn’t even respond, she was so hurt and offended. But what she wanted to tell her was that she would make this as hard as she fucking pleased, she would throw a whole-ass tantrum if she felt like it. Because at the end of the day, this was Aya’s doing, and no matter how many sad faces and sad noises she made about it, she had decided that her career was worth more to her than Mia was. It was an entirely calculated move on her part. Mia was the one who was reacting from a place of genuine emotion.

Soon after the breakup, Louis’ tour started, and Amir got accepted to his fellowship, and Sunday announced she was taking the summer off from equestrian competitions and coming back home to rehab her horse Duchess from an injury and “center herself,” whatever that means. Mia figured Liam would need help with the twins, and Sunday would need help with learning to unclench, and what was the point of spending 75% of her paltry paycheck on rent when she had family twenty minutes away? So she went home to lick her wounds.

The car rolls to a stop in the circular drive, next to the quietly gushing fountain in the center. Fat baby cherubs pour water on each other endlessly. The boys are both at practice, and the house is quiet besides their housekeeper vacuuming upstairs. She thinks Liam might be at the farmer’s market, or something. He’s always trying to stay on top of the latest trends in vegetables.

He’s not, though. He surprises her in the kitchen when she’s pouring some cold brew into a chipped UCLA mug, clapping her on the shoulder with a pinky-ringed hand.

“Fuck,” Mia says, startled. She’s still full of adrenaline. “Hi.”

“Hey.” Liam leans past her, grabbing a bowl from the cabinet, then double takes at her face. “Oh, Mims, what happened?”

“Nothing,” she says, ducking away and going over to the breakfast nook to sit down with her coffee. It’s up against a massive window that looks out at the sprawling backyard. Their house is all windows, now that they live on an entirely pap-proof compound.

She hears Liam rummaging in the freezer, and then he comes over with a bag of peas and sits across from her, offering it to her.

Mia takes it and presses it to her mouth and nose. It feels good.

“You take a ball to the face?” Liam says, eyeing her. “I heard you lot won, I had the radio on while I was in the garden.”

“I know,” she says, lowering the peas a little. “Dad texted me that you told him we won. Thanks for listening.”

“‘Course,” Liam says. “You’re playing pro football, that’s extremely cool.”

Mia’s gut twists like eels. “Barely pro. And I practically bought my way on.”

“Mims, that’s not true.”

Mia sets the peas down on the little wood table, then rests her face on them.

“Alright, what happened?” Liam says, now in dad mode. “You want a cup of tea? Don’t drink that coffee, it’s four in the afternoon. I’ll make you some herbal tea. You hungry at all? You want a sandwich?”

“No thank you,” Mia mumbles into the peas. “Liam?”

“Yeah?”

“I got in a fight, after the game. With a player on the other team. That’s what happened to my face.”

Liam heaves a sigh and reaches out to pat her on the back. “Mims…”

“I know. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t start it.”

“What happened?”

“She said I was daddy’s little rich girl.”

“Oh, c’mon, that’s standard trash talk,” Liam says. “That’s the laziest thing she could’ve come up with to slam you on. It shouldn’t take away from your performance.”

Mia lifts her head; the cold was getting to be too much. She can’t bear to look at Liam’s kind face, so she stares out at his garden instead. It’s a swirling sea of color this time of year. “Yeah, well, my coach also said I’ve been playing like shit lately.”

“Well, you’ve been upset,” Liam says. “Breakups are horrible. I don’t perform my best, in that mindset. I don’t think anyone does.”

Mia nods, her jaw tight. The previously satisfying ache in her face has now dulled to an annoyance. “Yeah.”

“And your dad’s been gone on tour,” Liam says. “It’s always him you talk to about football strategy, and things. He’s your coach more than your coach is. So that’s probably had an effect.”

Mia didn’t even think of that. She glances up at Liam, who gives her a bracing smile.

“Don’t tell him about this,” she begs. “Please. I want him to think I’m doing well.”

“He’d understand if you aren’t,” Liam counters.

“But I don’t want to disappoint him. He’s just so happy right now, I don’t want him to worry about me.”

Liam nods. “That’s fine, love, I promise I won’t say anything.”

“Thanks.”

“Tea!” Liam says, getting to his feet and heading back to the kitchen. It’s cozy in here, with the dark wood and soft lighting of the room itself contrasted against the tangled riot of green through the window.

Mia can’t bring herself to love this house, as nice as it is. It’s not _her_ house, it’s not _their_ house, the way the one in Calabasas was. It’s probably silly, but she still grieves that house sometimes. She didn’t even realize she liked it that much, until it was gone.

And as comforting as it is, Liam’s affection feels kind of stifling, right now. If she’s honest with herself, ever since she’s been in this dark, weird mood, she’s been sorely missing Zayn. She relates to him most when she feels like this, when there’s a ball of burrs in her chest that tea can’t unknot.

Mia almost never dwells on this, but as Liam bangs around in the cabinets, she’s thinking about how he had tried to swoop in and be her dad before she was even born. It’s strange to contemplate, considering she barely knew the guy until she was six — and yet, it’s what happened.

She doesn’t begrudge him that, she knows it’s just a symptom of how much he loves Louis, but it’s the eternal sinister underpinning to an otherwise very warm step-relationship. _You tried to steal me_. And it’s only made more complicated by the fact that she has her own issues with Zayn, which she feels guilty and defensive about. Of course she has issues with her complicated, difficult, alcoholic father who cheated on her beloved dad, who wrecked their home. But Zayn loves her dearly, and she loves him dearly back, and wants to protect him from the world. That’s just how it is.

“You looking forward to having Dad back?” Mia says to Liam.

“Oh, yeah,” Liam says cheerfully, starting the kettle. “Don’t quite know what to do with myself when he’s not here.”

“Yeah, I noticed you’ve been a little off.”

“Some people aren’t good at being alone,” he says.

“True,” Mia says. “I’m not.”

Liam comes over to the island and leans on it, his chin in his hands. “It’s fresh,” he says, his voice gentle. “You only broke up a few months ago, and you were together for more than two years.”

“I didn’t break up,” Mia says fiercely, putting the peas back on her face. “She broke up. I didn’t do anything.”

Liam smiles at her.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he says. “Just remembering being dumped.”

Mia sniffs. “Was it always horrible for you too?”

“Oh, yeah,” Liam says, nodding enthusiastically. “The morning Ceci left for good, I gave Sunday to the nanny, went up on the roof of our penthouse, and I drank an entire case of beer and laid there for a whole afternoon. I couldn’t move, I just didn’t have it in me. Ended up with the worst sunburn I’ve ever had in my life.”

Mia laughs. “Did it help?”

“No.”

“What did help?”

Liam shrugs. “Therapy. Time. Your dad coming back into my life. That sort of thing.”

“Yeah, there aren’t a lot of Dads in the world,” Mia says.

“No. There really aren’t. I got lucky.”

This makes Mia sad for a reason she can’t name.

*

She finds Sunday doing yoga in the massive Liam-designed gym. The house had come with a gym originally, but he had several walls knocked down and gutted a library so he could expand it.

Amir had found the metaphor of this very funny, Liam destroying the library to make the gym bigger. After a few too many jokes at his expense in the SacFam group chat, Liam pointed out that every single one of them exclusively reads books on Kindle, and that four of the five kids are actively engaged in sports, with two of those four being professional athletes, so they could all kindly stop taking the piss. “i love my stonking massive gym,” he said, then sent a sunglasses emoji. “i will knock down every room in this house and just keep making the gym bigger… you will all sleep in the gym and you will like it.”

And it is a nice gym. There are bamboo plants in each corner, and lots of mirrors, so you can watch yourself sweat and turn magenta. Sunday isn’t watching herself, though; she has her eyes closed.

Mia is sitting on the floor, chewing gum while she watches her maintain a tree pose, when her phone rings. It’s Amir. She waves her watch at the earbud in her ear. “Yo.”

“Hey,” Amir says.

“Hey you. What time is it over there?”

“Midnightish. What are you up to?”

“Just hanging out with Sunday.”

“Anyone else?”

“No, just us.”

“Sick. Put me on speaker?”

Mia taps her watch, and his voice rings out, “Hey hey.”

Sunday, her right foot still planted firmly against her left thigh, cracks one dark eye open. “Um, I’m in the middle of yoga,” she calls.

“Cool, I don’t care,” Amir says cheerfully. “Listen, I’m about to buy you guys tickets to Vegas for tomorrow morning.”

Mia blinks at her watch. “What?”

“Yeah. Me and Evan already bought ours, we’re gonna get there around, like, noon I guess. For you guys it’s only an hour flight, so you can leave whenever, but I gotta buy ‘em now. I’m buying Jason’s now, so I want to add yours onto the order.”

Sunday drops out of tree pose as fast as a panther, falling onto her knees on her yoga mat and quickly crawling over to Mia so they can exchange an alarmed look.

“Amir, what are you _talking_ about?” Mia says.

“Oh my God,” Amir says, somehow managing to make it sound like she’s the one being unreasonable. “Okay, fine. Uhhh... Evan and I are gonna get married, alright? In Vegas. Tomorrow.”

Mia’s head starts to spin. She presses one hand very firmly to the floor to make sure it stays under her.

“That’s not funny,” she snaps.

Rustling over the line, like he’s moving papers around. “It’s not a joke,” Amir says, and she can tell he’s dead serious.

“Oh my God,” Sunday whispers.

“Are you pregnant?” Mia says.

“No!” Amir’s tinny voice cries. “We’re just doing this, okay? I can explain better tomorrow. But I want you guys there. So just tell me if I can buy the fucking tickets, or if you guys are gonna be busy with like, the Kentucky Derby and the World Cup.”

“I don’t race horses,” Sunday says dryly. “I’m not a jockey. For the millionth time.”

“She’s way too tall to be a jockey,” Mia says, trying to be funny to relieve herself of the terrible head-pounding, penny-tasting _my baby brother is eloping_ anxiety that she’s in the grip of. It doesn’t work.

“Whatever, whatever. Come on,” he begs.

Mia is near-speechless, but she figures she needs to see Amir in person if she’s going to work out what’s going on here. “Okay,” she says, after a moment. “Yeah, buy the tickets. We can fly out around, like, eleven I guess.”

“Eleven is fine,” Sunday concurs.

“Okay, cool. Lemme go, and I’m gonna do that. Thanks, guys.”

“Sure,” Mia says faintly.

Amir hangs up, and the girls start laughing to release all their nervous energy.

“Holy shit,” Sunday says.

Mia shakes her head. “He can’t do this,” she says. “This is insane.”

Suddenly she’s full of questions. Who proposed, why now, why Vegas? She knows they talk about marriage, because Amir has told her that they do, and they walk around with those promise rings on like they’re Jesus-loving Catholic schoolboys who are saving themselves for marriage, instead of a lapsed Protestant and a half-atheist Muslim who have already gotten an abortion together. But she always thought the rings were a longing, Beach Boys kind of thing, not a specific goal they were rushing toward. It doesn’t make sense — Amir is so exacting and meticulous about his future. He always plans and plans and plans.

Sunday squeezes her shoulder. “Hey, let’s go make drinks,” she says, getting to her feet. “I need a drink, and I think you need one even more than me.”

Mia gets up and follows her downstairs to the massive basement bar, mute with shock.

LAS VEGAS, AUGUST 11, 2039

 _Welcome to LAS VEGAS!,_ a massive sign at McCarran Airport declares to Mia and Sunday as they head down the escalator, backpacks in tow. Mia’s head is pounding from drinking too much last night and then barely sleeping. She forgot to pack aspirin.

Her face still hurts, too, although today you can’t tell someone punched her, other than her upper lip being a little swollen. It’s actually a kind of flattering swelling, if you don’t notice the purple mark from a broken blood vessel.

“I can’t believe he bought us tickets in coach,” she says, sliding her sunglasses down over her eyes. “He knows I already have to fly coach all the time for work. And it’s _his_ wedding.”

Coach did not help the headache. The flight was only an hour, but it had two babies on it, and no Sprites. Sprite always makes Mia feel better. They had 7-Up, which is just flatly not the same.

“Yeah, that was rude,” Sunday says, laughing. “We should bail on his wedding and go gamble instead.”

“Dude, I really do want to gamble, actually,” Mia says, linking arms with her. “Will you gamble with me? Please?”

“Maybe,” Sunday says, putting her own sunglasses down over her eyes as they descend low enough that the mid-morning sun is now blasting through the glass walls of the airport at them. “I mean, I’ll watch _you_ gamble.”

“Hey, you think Amir knows how to count cards?”

“Oh, definitely,” Sunday says.

They let the crowd sweep them along to baggage claim. Everyone else from their flight starts pawing through the piles of identical black suitcases while they look around for Amir and Evan, who texted that they’d meet them down here.

“There they are,” Sunday says, pointing.

The baby fiancés are standing about twenty feet away, also wearing sunglasses. Amir has his arm slung casually around Evan’s waist, and he’s vaping. Evan’s holding up a massive, handmade sign that says MIA AND SUNDAY: WELCOME HOME FROM PRISON.

Mia laughs as they head over, and embraces Amir, squeezing him. He smells like hotel soap and vape smoke. “Is that the best you could come up with?”

“Leave me alone, I barely slept last night,” he says.

“Yeah, I didn’t either,” Mia says, hugging Evan as Sunday hugs Amir. “Hey Evan, it’s been a minute.”

He pats her on the back. “Hey Mia.”

“What,” Amir says, “did you stay up all night, worrying about my mental state?”

“No,” Mia retorts.

Amir turns to Sunday. “Did she?”

With a look of grim, priestlike responsibility to the truth, Sunday nods. 

Mia scoffs. On her left, people from their flight start hurrying past her, dragging their rolling suitcases along. Evan puts his arm up and gently herds her to the right so she doesn’t get trampled.

“We’ll talk about it at the hotel,” he suggests. “We can get lunch, talk, you guys can get changed… we can answer any questions you have…”

“Oh, I have a _lot_ of questions,” Mia says, looking to Amir, who shrugs like he can’t imagine why she would.

Evan, looking over their heads at something, raises his hand and waves. “Yo,” he calls.

They all turn. Jason is striding toward them, pulling a Louis Vuitton suitcase and wearing Gucci slides. So he’s clearly stopped dressing in starving artist drag, like he was doing in college. The last Mia heard of him, he was working in finance in New York, courtesy of his dad.

“Hey, it’s your boyfriend,” Mia says to Sunday.

“A-ha-ha-ha,” Sunday deadpans.

Jason swaggers to a stop. “Hi pals,” he says, with his usual disingenuous smarm.

Amir blows vape smoke at him. “Hi.”

“Jason, I find it really hard to believe you agreed to fly coach,” Mia says to him.

Jason laughs. “I upgraded the ticket as soon as he sent it.”

“You’re all so ungrateful,” Amir says. “I should’ve made you buy your own tickets.”

“To a wedding we barely agreed to attend?” Mia says. “On zero notice?”

“Wah wah wah,” Amir says, much more witlessly than is normal for him. He must be really tired.

“I don’t mind coach,” Sunday says. “The flight attendants don’t bother you as much in coach.”

Everyone looks at her like she’s from another planet, as they sometimes do.

“Can we go?” Evan says. “I don’t like us all standing around like this, I feel like we’re about to get papped, or mobbed, or like my dad’s about to jump out from behind a trash can and snipe me.”

“Let’s roll,” Jason says. “I want a mimosa.”

*

Mia joins Evan and Amir at the rooftop bar at their hotel; it’s sweltering out, but there’s plenty of shade, and the drinks are mostly slushy. She’s relieved to see that Amir orders a slushy screwdriver for himself, because that means he probably isn’t actually pregnant.

The bar is almost deserted this time of day, so they get a couch-filled corner lounge all to themselves. Las Vegas spreads out below them, all twinkly and seedy, with the sound of car honks faintly making their way up here to the 25th floor.

“Kind of sus that Jason only went to go shower after Sunday did,” Amir says, sipping his drink. “What are the odds he tries to bust in on her and pretends he thought he was in his own room?”

Evan and Mia laugh.

“Where am I, where am I,” Evan says, feeling around, feigning blindness. “Is this the pool?” He grabs Amir by the pec. “Is this a slot machine?”

Amir cracks up. Evan, smiling, settles his arm over the back of the purple couch behind him, rubbing at his shoulder with his thumb.

Mia observes them, then takes a sip of her Blue Hawaiian. It tastes like Gatorade, which means it’s weaker than she wanted it to be. “You guys are cute.”

“Gross,” Amir says, but he’s smiling too. “So do we have your blessing, Mom?”

“Shut up,” she says. She glances at the skyline for a moment, then says, “I mean, I guess you know what you’re doing, right?”

“We do,” Amir says.

Mia turns back to him, searching his face. He looks more serious than usual.

“I just don’t want to see you get in over your head,” she says, then addresses Evan: “Either of you. I mean, you’re basically family now, too, Evan. And you actually will be, after this. I take that really seriously, I hope you do too.”

“Nah, not at all,” Amir answers for him. “This is a joke. We’re doing it for clout.”

Evan squeezes his shoulder to shut him up. “I do take it seriously,” he says to her. “And I know you’re protective of him, I get it.”

Amir rolls his eyes and reaches for his big squiggly pink straw to sip his screwdriver with.

“I’m protective of both of you!” she says. “We’re all really young, y’know?”

“We’re not _that_ young,” Amir says. “You realize Pops was already a father at my age? And was married at your age?”

Mia’s heart quickens with frustration, her temper aided along by the alchemy of the hot sun and the rum. “Is that really your thought process? It’s okay because of our parents’ fucked-up marriage that ended with, like, adultery and divorce?”

“Yeah, but we aren’t them,” Amir says, his face fierce. “We’re doing this for the right reasons.”

“What are those reasons?” Mia begs him, pushing her sunglasses up so she can see him better.

Evan looks kind of sweaty and uncomfortable, like he’s in a police interrogation. Hopefully it’s just the jet lag.

“Just, to like — to be committed,” Amir says, sounding like he’s as frustrated as she is. “To show everyone we’re committed, to show each other we’re committed, to just, like, have that bond, y’know! If shit is tough, or whatever, we can fall back on the fact that we’re married. It’s like always having a buddy, right? Buddy system?”

This isn’t reassuring Mia, who thought that her brainy, skeptical brother would have more thorough reasoning than this. She has the creeping anxiety of realizing that, against all logic, she might be the most mature person present.

“Why does it have to be now?” she says. “At your age?”

“Our lives are starting now! We’re not like other people, y’know? If we were just two nobodies, it would be whatever, but there’s just a lot of pressure on us — like, we want to lock this in.”

Evan is nodding.

“But you know,” Mia presses on, wanting to make sure all of the responsibility bases are covered, “the fact that we are who we are means this is gonna get press. Like, if you regret it after, and you want to back out or anything, it’ll already have gotten coverage —“

“We’re not backing out,” Evan interrupts.

It’s Amir’s turn to nod. “We’re serious about this,” he says. “I swear. We’re on the same page.”

“Okay,” Mia says, and thus releases them to their own decision-making skills. “Okay, fine.”

Amir smiles. “You brought your Leica like I asked, right?”

“Yeah, why?”

“I want you to shoot the ceremony.”

Mia is kind of touched. “You want photos?”

“Yeah, for the dads,” Amir says. “Maybe they won’t be so pissed we eloped, if there’s photos.”

This is boyishly innocent in a way that makes Mia’s heart hurt. “Meer,” she says, carding her hair back as the wind whips it around her face. “You _sure_ you don’t want to just wait and do it with everyone around?”

Evan lifts his hand behind Amir in an open-handed shrugging gesture. “I asked him the same thing.”

“You know how it is, Mia,” Amir says. “Everyone’s been prying into our shit our whole lives. Don’t you ever just want to do something in private? Don’t you get tired of listening to our dads’ fucking PR people tell us what we should and shouldn’t do?”

“Yeah, but it —“

They’re interrupted by the appearance of Jason, who drops into the seat next to Mia and kicks his feet up on the table, almost knocking Evan’s beer over. “Hey. Wassup?”

Amir grins at him. “Where’s Sunday? Have you murdered her?”

“Dude, shut up,” Jason complains, as Evan and Mia snicker. “You know, you guys are so annoying now that you’re together. All you do is gang up on me.”

“It’s kind of your fault they’re together,” Mia points out, sipping her blue slush and giving him a sideways look.

Jason lifts his Ray Bans up. “How?”

“No, she’s right,” Amir says, his eyes crinkling with delight. “Right after you crashed the Ferrari, that’s when Evan made a move.”

“Honestly, that actually did have a lot to do with it,” Evan admits.

“I did this?” Jason exclaims. “I’m the architect of my own nightmare?”

“Jason, Jason,” Amir says, tipping his chin up at him. “Hey. D’you think you could get coke, here? D’you know anyone in Vegas?”

Mia eyes Jason, who shrugs and says, “I could try,” in a strained voice that makes it clear he probably wouldn’t succeed.

“I know a couple people here,” Mia says quietly. “From soccer. But why coke, Meer? Why don’t we do molly or something, if you want to party tonight?”

“I don’t like molly,” Amir says, his mouth a flat line. “It makes me grind my teeth. I already grind my teeth at night.”

“No, it’s ‘cos you had a bad time on it, way back in high school,” Jason says. “Just do the molly. Leave coke to the big boys.”

Amir gives him the finger. “Please.”

Evan and Mia exchange a look. They’ve talked before, behind Amir’s back, about how they don’t like him doing coke. He’s just too sensitive to it, it spikes or drops his mood like crazy. Plus, he doesn’t always use it to party. Sometimes he uses it so he can stay up until 7 a.m. playing the piano, which is actually more worrisome than him partying.

Mia’s scared stiff of him being brought down at the beginning of his life by the things that have plagued Zayn for decades. It’s a worry that she has to mostly repress and stay in denial about.

“I’ll text my friend,” she interrupts. “I’ll see what’s up, alright? But I mean, c’mon, Amir, are we here for your wedding or are we here to get stupid?”

“We’re here for my wedding,” Amir says. “I just want you guys to have fun after.”

“If you’re worried about being a good host, don’t fly your guests coach,” Mia informs him.

He laughs. “Mims! I had to! My discretionary fund’s like, _gone._ ”

They each have a savings account attached to their checking that Louis and Zayn refill once a year with cash, depending on their anticipated expenses for the year. (Mia only got about ten grand this year, since she’s gainfully employed, and hasn't touched it since she started living at home). Their dads don’t ask them any questions about their spending beyond this, but if they blow through it halfway through the year, it’s a problem.

“Aren’t you making money?” Mia says to him. “Playing sessions? Aren’t you getting residuals?”

“Not that much,” he hedges.

“Right. You’re spending it all on clothes and going out, aren’t you?”

“And the rent on my sublet,” Amir retorts. “London is stupid expensive.”

“Uh-huh,” Mia says. “What about your stipend from your fellowship?”

“I have expenses!”

“Listen, I’ll take care of the coke,” Jason says generously. “As a wedding gift.”

Evan laughs.

“So what did you guys tell Liam when you left?” Amir says to Mia, clearly wanting to change the subject.

Mia shrugs. “Just that we were going to meet you guys in Vegas and party before you come home to Cali. He told us to have fun.”

Amir nods, looking down at his wrist, toying with the Rolex on it.

“Hey,” Mia says to him, “you remember, right, that we’re doing a dads dinner in Malibu tomorrow night?”

“Right,” Amir mutters.

“You gonna tell both of them about this then?”

Amir shrugs. Evan inhales and starts worrying at his thumbnail with his finger and biting his lower lip.

Mia realizes, then, that neither of them has a plan for how they’re going to tell their parents.

SACRAMENTO, AUGUST 11, 2039

Liam screeches to a stop outside Elk Grove Country Day School, quickly parking the Lambo and slamming the door shut (to the extent that you can actually slam butterfly doors).

The school is a sprawling and ultra-secure stone compound, like most schools in this part of California. They’re chockablock now. Wine country, including Sacramento, has seen skyrocketing land prices and demands for Whole Foods locations, expensive private schools, and fancy sushi restaurants as anxious Californians flee north to escape a flaming and crumbling Los Angeles.

At the gate to the courtyard, a security guard swipes Liam’s watch to verify his identity and then accompanies him to the front office.

“So what is this about?” Liam says to the secretary, picking up a stylus to sign in on the tablet. “I get a call from you lot out of the blue in the middle of the day that you’ve suspended my son, and you won’t tell me anything over the phone —“

“Principal Kierman will explain everything in her office,” the secretary says soothingly. “Patrick is in there too. I’ll walk you in.”

Liam nods and follows her. She’s a hippie type, wearing a kaftan and her long hair loose. Everyone at this school is a hippie type — they have feeling circles and art time and a big garden where each kid gets a tomato plant.

He and Louis were happy about that, when they moved here. Louis doesn’t go in for the more goofy California shit like Liam does, but he agreed the gardening was nice, and liked the more relaxed vibe. By the time they moved, he was already worried that Mia, Sunday and Amir’s brains had been warped by their moneyed, image-conscious prep school in Calabasas. “I’m glad they’ve all done well,” Louis had said, “but I’m worried we made a mistake. I want the little ones to have a break and just enjoy being young and normal, not get into any trouble.”

Well, that’s all gone to shit now, apparently, and Louis won’t even be home for a few more days. Liam can’t remember the last time he went to a serious school thing for the boys by himself. He went to a Parents Night alone after Louis left for tour, but that wasn’t anything like the one-on-one he’s about to walk into. He went alone to parent-teacher conferences for Sunday when she was little, up until he married Louis and felt he’d more than earned the right to be involved, but for the boys they’ve always gone together. He’s nervous.

Maybe the whole thing is a misunderstanding. He’s hoping that as he steps into the principal’s office, that she’s going to say, “Oh, Liam! So sorry you’ve come all the way out here! Never mind! Patrick is an angel.”

Not likely, though.

“I have Mr. Payne for you,” the secretary says in hushed tones to Kiernan, who nods from behind her massive wood desk. Patrick is already sat across from her. Noon sunlight is slanting ominously through the wood shutters on the windows.

“Hi, Mr. Payne,” Kiernan says, smiling at him and adjusting her glasses. “Nice to see you again. Please, have a seat next to Patrick.”

Liam does so; the chair is overstuffed and not very comfortable. He shoots a look at Patrick beside him. Patrick is slouched in his seat, his fisted hand pressed to his mouth, and avoiding his gaze. He’s in his school uniform as usual, but his maroon tie has been loosened and his blazer is tossed haphazardly over the chair behind him.

“So, we have a pretty big problem,” Kiernan says.

“Obviously, as you’ve suspended him,” Liam says.

Patrick laughs softly, and Liam snaps at him, “This isn’t funny. And sit up.”

Patrick sits up.

“Well, it’s a little complicated,” Kiernan says, clasping her hands.

“Break it down for me,” Liam says.

“We’ve been suspicious of a serious disciplinary issue in the school for a while now,” she says. “And we suspected Patrick was involved, since we’ve had similar problems with him in the past. But we didn’t have a break in the case until the kids came back from their July break.”

“A break in the case?” Liam repeats, incredulous.

Kiernan purses her lips at him. “Yes. We’ve suspected for a while that someone has been supplying our… ah… less writing-inclined students with essays that were written by someone above their skill level.”

Liam blinks. “Patrick isn’t writing-inclined,” he says. “He hates writing essays.”

“No, Patrick isn’t writing the essays,” Kiernan says. “Patrick is, ah. What would the word be? He appears to be the supplier. The kingpin.”

“Kingpin,” Liam repeats, his head ringing in disbelief.

“Yes,” she says, adjusting her glasses again.

He remembers, suddenly: three years ago, when Patrick had been tricking Amir into doing math homework for him so he could sell it to his classmates. But they told him, they told him how stupid and unethical that was. They read him the riot act. And he hadn’t done anything that brazen again — until now.

“It looks,” Kiernan says, “like Patrick has been organizing a kind of, um, a ring? He’s taken advantage of the fact that here at Elk Grove, we like to try to tackle more ambitious, off the beaten path material in our English courses. This has the helpful effect, of course, of preventing students from easily cribbing essays online.”

“Right,” Liam says, wishing she’d hurry up.

Kiernan scoots forward in her chair a little. “So, according to our informant —”

“Your _informant?_ ”

“Yes. A student was caught with an essay this morning that had been plagiarized from an older student,” Kiernan says. “The teacher recognized the essay, as he’d graded it only a year prior. We brought the original writer in, and she confessed to us that Patrick and his little ring of co-conspirators has been paying juniors and seniors to sell their old essays, as well as hiring students to write new essays on demand. According to her, most of those students were ones who attend the school on a full scholarship,” she adds, her voice dripping with opprobrium.

“That’s not fair,” Patrick exclaims. “I didn’t _target_ them, okay? They came to me.”

His heart thumping and head pounding harder, Liam puts a hand up and says, “Patrick, hush.”

“Well, she’s making me sound evil, Dad! Nothing evil happened! People made money, and other people got good grades, and everyone was happy about it!”

Liam, horrified, hisses “ _Hush_!” at him.

Kiernan’s eyes flash as she turns her gaze to Liam. “As you can see, he’s already confessed. However, he won’t name his co-conspirators, which has forced me to give him a two-week suspension.”

All of this is dizzying. Name his co-conspirators? What is this, _The Wire?_ “Alright,” Liam sighs. “Okay. Um… Look, I’m just, I guess, confused. I don’t understand how this happened.”

“Well, you can talk to your son about that. We know very little, as of right now.”

“Right, but — okay. Um.” Liam bounces his leg, chewing at the inside of his cheek. “So, what, he’s suspended, but no one else is?”

“The student who sold her essay to him received an in-school suspension,” Kiernan says. “Right now, we aren’t sure who else was involved, and as I said, Patrick wouldn’t give us any names. He said he’s not a snitch.”

Liam has to swallow a laugh at this. It’s hard for him to guess who the other kids might be — Patrick has a new gang of friends every semester, now.

Kiernan turns to Patrick. “You understand,” she says in a chilly voice, “in the real world, this type of behavior is the basis for white-collar crime. Fraud, racketeering, price fixing —“

“Oh —” _Fuck off_ , Liam almost says, but he recovers himself just in time. “Come on. He’s fourteen. Don’t put that in his head.”

“I don’t think it’s an unfair comparison to draw.”

“Well, I do,” Liam says hotly. “Alright, thank you for laying all that out for me, but I think we’re gonna be on our way, unless there’s anything else you need to tell me?”

Kiernan holds out a piece of paper, which he takes. It says DISCIPLINARY ACTION FORM across the top.

“Right,” Liam says, standing up he skims the paper. He doesn’t absorb any of it; he’s hot in the face and his eyes aren’t focusing. “Thanks. Paddy, let’s go.”

Patrick gets to his feet.

“Patrick,” Kiernan says. “I don’t want you to think of this as a vacation. Your teachers will send you your assignments each day, and we expect them to be completed. And you’re banned from participating in any after-school activities, which includes DECA and basketball.”

“Yeah, I got that,” Patrick says.

“Lacrosse, actually,” Liam says. “Basketball’s winter, he’s doing lacrosse right now.”

Kiernan looks at him like he’s an asinine degenerate for making this clarification. “Yes. Any sports team he’s on, he’s banned from participation for two weeks. Any further punishment is up to his coaches, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s benched for the rest of the season.”

“I _get_ it,” Patrick repeats in annoyance.

Liam takes his son firmly by the shoulders and steers him out.

*

Liam doesn’t talk for most of the drive home. Patrick keeps looking over at him with anxiety, clearly waiting for his dad to start in on him, but Liam doesn’t want to speak in anger or yell. He wants to be calm. He drives manually, so he has something to concentrate on.

When they’re about five minutes from home, meandering through the woods, Liam finally says, “You’re not a white collar criminal in the making, and she shouldn’t have said that to you.”

“I know,” Patrick says.

Liam puts the car in self-drive and looks over at him. “But I am concerned,” he says. “This is serious shit, Patrick. You could get expelled for these sorts of things! You could’ve been kicked off your teams!”

“But I wasn’t, though.”

“So what! And even beyond the consequences, it’s unethical, and just irresponsible. We told you this way back when, years ago, when you were sellin’ those homework answers! Why are you always after these money-making schemes? We _give_ you money! I think we’re fairly generous, actually!”

Patrick looks a little exasperated. “It isn’t about making money,” he says, like this is obvious. “It’s about making a business.”

Liam struggles for a response. “You couldn’t just run a lemonade stand?”

Patrick laughs.

“Really, I don’t get it. You do your DECA thing. You did Boy Scouts just to get the entrepreneur badge. You’ve got so many outlets, so this must be about something else. Is something bothering you?”

“Dad,” Patrick says, sounding exasperated. “Not everything is some big emotional thing. You and Dads are so, like… I wanted to do something without being supervised for once! Is that so crazy?”

“Yeah, it is! In this instance, it is! Look, your principal’s sort of got a point that unethical shit needs to get nipped in the bud. When you’re an adult, you’re not saved by the fact that you’re in school — and I know that it feels the opposite, like school’s what fucked you over, but let me explain something to you. You like helping Louis with his charities, right? You like going over business plans with him?”

Patrick nods.

“Let’s say in ten years, Louis brings you on to help him run a foundation,” Liam says. “And someone comes to you and says, hey, Paddy, cash out a bit of your donations and hand them over to us, lad, we’ll invest ‘em in this great opportunity and you’ll make it back tenfold. Sound like a good idea?”

“Maybe,” Patrick says. “I mean, yeah, if the opportunity is real.”

“No,” Liam bellows at him. “That’s self-dealing, it’s illegal! D’you understand, now, what I’m saying?”

Patrick swallows and looks out at the windshield. Liam immediately regrets having yelled. That was exactly what he didn’t want to do, and now he’s done it.

“Can you explain to me how on earth you thought this was a good idea?” he says, more calmly. “How didn’t you learn your lesson from when you pulled that math homework nonsense? Or when you got yelled at for sneaking out of the lunchroom to bring Taco Bell back and sell it at markup?”

Patrick shrugs helplessly. “I knew I was breaking the rules, I just think the rules are stupid.”

“Why? Why would the rules be stupid?”

“‘Cos not everyone is good at writing essays!”

“Yeah, not everyone is good at everything, we all have our strengths. There’s way more honor in getting a crappy mark on something you worked hard on, than cheating your way into a good one!”

“But that sucks, Dad,” Patrick says. “People pay so much money to go to that school so they can go to a good college, right? But our English teachers bring down everyone’s GPA by assigning like, this fucking —“

“Oi, don’t you swear at me, I’m not Louis.”

“Sorry. This stupid weird poetry that doesn’t even make sense, and it’s totally subjective what it means. But the teacher only accepts one interpretation. So me and my friends were talking —”

“Which friends?” Liam says. The car pulls up to their driveway, and he hangs his wrist out the window, beeping the gate open.

“Uh,” Patrick says. “Sam, Nathan, and Rodman. We knew people like, passed old essays around and stuff, but we wanted to do it in a more organized way, and we wanted to make it so the people who were giving out their essays could get paid for it. ‘Cos honestly, most of the kids who don’t want to spend time on the reading but still want to get good grades are the ones who are loaded. And the kids who try hardest are on scholarships.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So we started going around to people who we knew were good at English and asking them if they wanted to make a little money. And we got people together, and then we’d have them pre-write some essays once the assignments came out. And we’d wait ‘til the night before, or two nights before, and we’d send out a group text, like, hey, if you haven’t started your essay yet, text Patrick. And they’d text me, and I’d say, I’ll give you a totally finished essay, guaranteed A, for two hundred bucks. And honestly, most of them would pay, ‘cos otherwise they were gonna eat the zero.”

“Two hundred bucks,” Liam repeats, in disbelief. “So how much of that went to your writers?”

“Most of it,” Patrick said. “Honestly. Like, a hundred fifty. We didn’t pay them per essay, though, we pooled the money and then we split it across the writers evenly and kept the rest for ourselves. Plus we paid twenty-five an essay for already finished essays, and we sold those at a discount.”

“Jesus Christ...”

“It was working really well!” Patrick exclaims. “We just kept getting more and more people, and everyone was loving us. We were getting invited to senior addys, and everything —“

“Addys?”

“Parties. But it kind of backfired, I guess, ‘cos people started not doing their essays ‘cos they knew they could just buy one? And we couldn’t keep up with the demand, so we started reusing old essays from like one or two years ago, which I didn’t want to do, ‘cos I thought it would get us caught, but Rodman said we should risk it. And then we did get caught, so.”

“Patrick,” Liam sighs, as they roll down their impossibly long driveway. “It is just… so, so stupid to risk your future on an idiot scheme like this.”

“But Dad, I don’t, like —” Patrick seems to struggle for what to say. “I dunno. I don’t see myself going to college, really.”

“Uh-uh. You’re going.”

“I want to start a business and then focus on that.”

“You go to college to study business,” Liam snaps. “You can start a business in college, and if you’re a takeoff success, _then_ you leave. You think you’re such a hotshot? Guess what, you didn’t start a real business here, love! You didn’t face healthy competition, or regulations, or anything like that that you’d run into in the real world. ‘Cos what you were doing was against the rules! The only thing you had that other people didn’t was your fucking nerve! And you’ve got a lot, I’ll give you that!”

“Why’s that such a bad thing?” Patrick retorts. “Huh? Since when is it so bad to have balls, in this family? Sunday didn’t go to college. Sunday does something crazy where she could fall off and break her neck, that’s what she does with her life, but I don’t see you mad about that.”

“I’ve had plenty of talks with Sunday about her choices,” Liam says, pressing the keyless ignition as they roll around the fountain and come to a stop in front of the house. “But this isn’t about her, it’s about you. You’ve got so much to learn about life, and you think you don’t, and that’s a problem, honestly. And it really — I mean, I’m gonna have to talk to Louis, and we’ll figure out what sort of things you can do over the next two weeks to help get your head on straight, to make sure this is a lesson learned.”

“Alright,” Patrick says glumly.

“And by the way,” Liam says, not wanting to give up this prime lecturing opportunity, “you go to college to study business ‘cos that’ll teach you how to do it right, and not get yourself in trouble by mistake, like the example I gave you. People you’ll want to work with will value that education ‘cos it’s a certain credential. It’s something you can hand people and say, look, I’ve got this backing me up. Honestly, if I could go back to school and study business, I would. It’d have helped me so much in my career. There are things I just had to learn from experience, and they weren’t _good_ experiences, alright?”

They get out of the car. It’s stiflingly hot. Liam thinks about going for a swim, but it’s so boring to hit the pool without Louis or the kids to pal around with. He just does laps robotically when he’s by himself.

“You’re donating all that money,” Liam says to him. “However much you made, and even what you spent already, you’re in debt to us for it, ‘cos you’re giving every last cent to charity.”

Patrick, rolling up the sleeves of his polo, sighs and says, “Fine. Yeah. I get it.”

“Was Max involved at all?”

Patrick shakes his head. “Nah.”

Liam sags a little in relief. “Did you tell him about it?”

Patrick laughs. “Did I tell _El Presidente_ about it? No, Dad, I didn’t. I mean, he figured it out anyway, but I never came out and told him. I didn’t want to him to have to keep it secret from you.”

“He figured it out? Like, he asked you about it?”

“Yeah,” Patrick says. “I told him not to worry about it.”

“He should’ve worried about it,” Liam says. “He should’ve told us.”

“Us?” Patrick repeats. “I started it after Dad left, so.”

Liam starts toward the house and beckons him. “Don’t start with that again, alright? He’ll be home within the week. He texts our group chat almost every single day.”

“I know,” Patrick mutters.

“Y’know, he didn’t even _want_ to leave, ‘cos he was worried about you boys,” Liam says, swiping the front door open. “But I told him you’d be fine, and you wouldn’t act up. Guess I was wrong.”

They step into the air conditioned house, exhaling in relief.

“It’s not your fault,” Patrick says, glancing up at him.

“So is that what this is, then?” Liam says. “You’re acting out ‘cos Lou isn’t here?”

Patrick hesitates, then says, “No.”

“Y’know, you kids have been the center of his world for twenty-three years. This is the first time he’s done anything truly for himself in a really long time.”

“I know,” Patrick says, looking guilty now.

It’s almost too easy to straighten out the kids if he can make them feel guilty about Louis.

“Alright,” Liam relents. “Go to your room while I think about this.”

This is a new parenting dilemma, truly. He’s probably going to have to crack open some books for this one. What to do when the school calls your fourteen-year-old son a kingpin? Maybe Reddit would know.

“Fine,” Patrick says, and starts to head for the stairs.

“Hey,” Liam calls after him. He stops without turning around. “You’re not a bad kid, okay? You did something properly stupid, and there’s gonna be consequences, but I love you, and you’re not a bad kid.”

Patrick continues on. “Oka-ay,” he calls as he climbs the stairs. “Love you too, Dad.”

Liam heaves a sigh and heads down the hallway into the kitchen, grabbing two beers out of the fridge and taking them out back with him. He presses a button on the wall of the house that extends a UV-blocking canopy out over his little patio garden, then heads into it and starts weeding. He rings Louis without thinking. The call seems like it’s about to go to voicemail until Louis picks up and with a distracted-sounding, “Hi sweetheart.”

“Hi,” Liam says, already having decided not to tell him about Patrick yet. He clips a branch off of a tomato plant, looking out over the rolling hills of their back acre and wondering again if he ought to plant some grapes and start bottling his own wine. Their soil would be good for grapes. “How’s it going?”

“Eh, alright. I just got to L.A. about an hour ago, actually.”

“Good flight?”

“Everyone except me got drunk,” Louis sighs. “So now they’re all running about the venue like idiots.”

“Your crew got drunk on airplane servings? That doesn’t sound right.”

“Oli had a massive flask and was spiking everyone’s drinks for them.”

“Ah, that sounds more right. Sorry I’m not there, by the way.”

“Aw, love, it’s fine. You lot all came to my San Francisco show, you flew back home to see me in Donny, you performed with me in New York… You’ve done your marital duties, I promise.”

“I know, but I’d like to party with you.”

“Well, have the girls watch the twins again and just come on down! It’s not too late.”

“I can’t,” Liam says regretfully. “They’re in Vegas. The girls, Amir and Evan.”

“ _Vegas_? I thought Amir was flying straight home, I was actually gonna ask you if he’d made it in yet.”

“He’s made it in,” Liam says. “Just, y’know, in to Vegas. Mims just posted a photo of all of them at the hotel.”

“Vegas,” Louis repeats.

“Yep. Jason is there, too.”

There’s silence over the line, then Louis says, “I’ve got a weird feeling about the kids.”

Liam stops weeding. “Weird feeling?”

“Yeah, I feel like something’s up.”

“Nothing’s up,” Liam says quickly, thinking of both Patrick and Mia. “Don’t worry, alright? Focus on your show tonight.”

“You know my feelings are usually right,” Louis adds.

Oh _no_. Now Liam has to gaslight him. He feels like a monster. He twists the top off one of the beers and takes a long swig.

“Yeah, but things have been off, right, ‘cos you’ve been gone all summer?” he says, willing his voice to stay low and normal. Thank God Louis didn’t FaceTime him, he’d never pull this off otherwise. “So maybe you’re decalibrated. You’re just homesick, and it’s making you feel weird.”

“Decalibrated,” Louis repeats, and laughs.

Liam, who’s beginning to swelter from the heat and from lying to Louis, rips a weed out of the ground a little too forcefully. “It’s all fine,” he says again. “The older kids, I think they’re just blowing off steam.”

“Alright, if you say so,” Louis says.

“Break a leg, alright? I’ll have Arielle call me so I can listen.”

“Aww,” Louis says. “My biggest fan.”

“Your biggest fan! Always. Me and Niall.”

He laughs again. “Bye Payno. I’ll ring you after, say goodnight.”

Louis has called him almost every night that he’s been on tour, when the time zones have worked out. They talk a little, then Louis says goodnight and falls asleep with his phone on speaker next to him. Liam thought that Louis was doing this for his sake, as a marital courtesy, until Louis was drunk one night and admitted to him he finds it hard to fall asleep if he can’t listen to Liam breathing.

“Alright love,” Liam says. “Bye.”

They hang up, and he pounds the rest of the beer before texting Max: _so your brother’s been suspended._

 _i know,_ Max texts back almost immediately. He must be at lunch. _my friends said they pulled him out of class_

_Did you know what he’d been doing, with this essay nonsense?_

_yeah,_ Max admits. _kinda. he didn’t come out and tell me i just kind of knew it was him_

_You should have told us love_

_sorry_

_It’s alright,_ Liam says. It’s hard to be angry at Max. _We could have stepped in before he got in trouble with the school, is all_

_Shoottttttttttttttttt. Didnt think abt that_

Liam hesitates, then says, _did you know he doesn’t want to go to uni?_

 _yeah,_ Max says.

_do YOU want to go to uni??_

_Im not sure_ , Max says. _idk what i want to study_

_Anything… literally anything. we just want you to go, ok?_

_if you guys rly want me to go than i’ll go. it’ll be wierd to go without paddy though_

_were working on that. Let us worry about that._

_okay_ , Max says. _sorry i didn’t tell you. :(_

_it’s alright buddy._

*

“So where are we going?” Mia shouts into the bathroom from where she sits on Amir and Evan’s hotel room bed, French braiding Sunday’s hair. “Like for the actual wedding?”

Outside the window, the sun is going down, and the Strip is beginning to twinkle.

“Uh,” Amir yells back. “This chapel I found online… it’s supposed to be the nicest one, or whatever.”

“Or _whatever_ ,” Sunday repeats quietly, imitating him, and Mia laughs. “Just getting married, no big deal…”

“I can’t even think about all this too hard, honestly,” Mia admits. “I’m just here for the ride.”

“Are you whispering about me out there?” Amir yells, his voice echoing in the bathroom acoustics.

“No! Narcissist!” Mia shouts back. “Can you get out here? I want to see whatever you bought that was so special it had to be a big secret.”

“It’s probably just a suit,” Sunday says. “But like, in a weird color.”

Through Harry, they each have access to an exclusive Net-a-Porter app where they can order designer outfits to be 3D printed and same-day delivered to them via drone. It’s cool, but it’s mostly too extravagant to actually use — the first time any of them had was last month, when Mia had accompanied Zayn to the red-carpet premiere of the HBO show he’s been producing, and forgot to get a dress until the day before. Amir apparently used it for tonight’s outfit, but he refused to tell them what he got.

They look up as he swans out of the bathroom and spreads his arms like, ta-da.

No suit. He’s wearing a white kurta over his black pants — it’s intricately beaded with gold, fitted snug to his frame with a diamond-shaped panel cut out that exposes most of his stomach, and bell sleeves. He has a small gold nath where his nose ring normally is, chained to his ear, and a gold choker around his neck.

“Is that, like, a sexy kurta?” Mia says to him, dropping Sunday’s hair and patting her on the back. “I’m done, you can tie this off.”

“I love it,” Sunday says drunkenly to Amir, pulling her hair tie off her wrist and wrangling the end of the braid. She’s such a lightweight, all she had was some airplane bottles out of the minbar and she’s already toasted. “You look like stripper Aladdin.”

“What?” Amir exclaims.

“In a good way!”

“Not _stripper_ Aladdin,” Mia says. “Belly dancer Aladdin. I think naths are Indian, by the way.”

“Nuh-uh! We’ve seen naths at weddings, and Lollywood movies... plus, either way, it looks cool.”

“It does look cool,” Mia agrees. “I might steal that idea for my wedding.”

“Don’t you dare copy me.”

“How come you can copy _India_ but I can’t copy you?”

“‘Cos I said so.” Amir adjusts it in his nose and grimaces. “It’s heavy, though.”

“Pain is beauty,” Sunday says.

“Can someone do my eyeshadow for me?” Amir says. “My hands are shaky.”

“Aww,” the girls chorus.

“I’m not nervous, I swear, I just haven’t eaten, and I drank, and I had a bunch of Red Bull…” He twists his fingers together, making a face. “I actually might be a little nervous. I dunno.”

Mia slides off the bed and beckons him to the vanity where she and Sunday already did their own makeup. He sits, and she flips the lighted mirror back on. “You having second thoughts?”

“No,” Amir says, and closes his eyes. She dips a brush in gold eyeshadow and starts sweeping it over his lids. “I’m actually not. Is that weird? I always overthink stuff.”

“It’s a good thing,” Sunday chirps from the bed. She’s facing them now, leaning over the edge of the bed with her chin in her hands, kicking her legs in the air behind her. She’s a funny drunk. “It means you’re sure.”

“Yeah,” Mia agrees, although her stomach is caught in a sickening vice of anxiety about this whole thing. She finishes his eyeshadow and says, “Can I do eyeliner, too? I know you don’t like it ‘cos your eyes are sensitive, but it would look good.”

Amir blinks up at her, then sighs and nods. “Yeah.”

Mia picks up a kohl pencil. “You can’t rub your eyes,” she warns. “Even if they get itchy.”

“I know!” He closes his eyes again, and she gets to work, moving her arm very delicately.

“Hey Sunday,” Mia says, “d’you want eyeliner?”

She shakes her head. “I’m okay with what you already put on me. I don’t like too much makeup, it makes my face feel greasy.”

“Greeazzzzy,” Amir repeats, slurring.

“Are you gonna wear any?” Sunday says to her.

Mia laughs. “I already am!”

“Oh shit.” Sunday squints at her. “You sure?”

“Yes!” She closes her eyes to show her.

“There it is.”

“This is my life with hooded eyelids.” Amir wiggles, and Mia grabs him by the face to hold him still. “So what’s Evan wearing?”

Amir cracks one eye open, and she waves at him to close it again. “Just a tux. That’s where him and Jason went, to go pick it up.”

“Does he even have money to rent a tux, without help from his daddy?”

“I gave him some,” Amir says. “I’m his daddy now.”

“Ew. Shut up.”

“Y’know, this whole thing is stupid fucking expensive. I didn’t think it would be.”

“I mean, you could’ve worn sweats, and not flown people out last minute.”

“That’s not fun, though. I wanted it to be a _little_ fun.”

Mia carefully dabs kohl into the center of his eyes, where his tear ducts are. When she’s done, Amir turns to Sunday. “Good?”

She gives him two thumbs up.

“What about me?” Mia says, glancing down at her outfit. She’s in all black — tight leggings, a black tank top, and black boots, with a white gold Rolex and a white gold Cuban chain on.

“I’m just surprised to see you in a fit that’s not a hundred percent Adidas,” Amir says.

“For the fiftieth time, I’m contractually obligated to wear that stuff.”

“Are you contractually obligated to look like a slob in it?” Amir challenges, and Sunday chokes on a laugh.

“Sunday!” Mia exclaims, as she’s gently whacking Amir upside the head.

“My hair,” Amir cries.

“Okay, listen,” Sunday says, putting her hands up. “I mean, it’s true, but you know I’m just as much of a slob. And you do look good right now.”

“Yeah, you clean up alright,” Amir says. Sunday nods in agreement.

“All the black isn’t too much, though?” Mia says. “It is a wedding.”

“It’s _my_ wedding,” Amir says. “Black is cool.”

*

Downstairs at the lobby bar, they wander around looking for Evan and Jason, distracted by the beautiful opulence of the hotel. Crystalline beads hang from every surface, draping the massive chandeliers above their heads and the railings around the lounge booths. The floor is shiny, reflecting the light from the glowing Strip outside the window. Violet lightbulbs cast a velvety, sumptuous tone over the large room.

Amir is catching people’s eyes as they walk by, but not in a gawky way or a judgmental one. They look at him like they can’t help it, their gazes drawn to him like there’s something special about him. People have been looking at him like that more and more, lately.

Evan must spot them walking over, because he comes up to them before they reach the bar. He’s already in his tux, his blonde hair swept back. He looks really young and nervous.

When they get close, he and Amir immediately embrace and start kissing like they’ve been apart for forty years. Mia looks over at Sunday, and they both mime gagging. The strange violet light is flickering over Sunday’s face like she’s underwater.

“Come on, guys,” Mia says, reaching up to tug at Evan’s sleeve. “We have to go.”

Amir stumbles back, his dark eyes remaining glued to Evan’s face. “I wanna drink,” he says.

“You can get another drink later,” Mia says. “You have to go get married first. They’re not gonna let you do it if you’re too drunk.”

“We’ll bribe them,” Amir says.

Evan cups Amir’s face in his hands, gazing at him. “You look like sexy Aladdin,” he says.

“That’s what _I_ said,” Sunday exclaims, and she and Evan high-five.

“I don’t!” Amir says, but he’s laughing. “Wasn’t Aladdin already sexy?”

“Yeah, I always kinda had a thing for Aladdin,” Evan admits, stroking a loose piece of Amir’s hair back.

He looks totally enchanted, which Mia suspects was the point of the whole outfit. Amir didn’t care about catching the eyes of random Vegas tourists, just Evan.

“I think we all did,” Sunday says.

They head over to the bar as a group to wrangle Jason, who’s dressed in a suit but also has on Lanvin sneakers, a tiny backpack and a backwards snapback. He’s talking to a beautiful blonde woman who’s leaning over the corner of the bar, her breasts practically spilling out of her top. She’s listening to him so intently that it’s immediately suspicious.

“So that’s the thing about blockchain,” Jason says. He sounds like he’s drunker than any of them. “It’s —“

Evan taps him on the shoulder and leans in. “We gotta go,” he says over the music.

“Wait, lemme introduce you guys to Angel,” Jason says. “I want to bring her to the wedding. She’s super into it.”

“Your name is Angel?” Mia says to her.

She nods without any facial expression whatsoever, like she’s fully aware of how this sounds.

“We’ve been talking about finance,” Jason says, loud and sloppy. “She thinks it’s really cool how I want to be a VC like my dad.”

“My favorite show is Shark Tank,” Angel says emotionlessly.

Amir leans in and whispers in Mia’s ear, “She’s a hooker, right?”

“Oh, one hundred percent,” Mia says.

As Jason and Angel are distracted by closing out their tab, Amir leans toward Evan and says, “Do you want to tell him, or can I?”

Evan looks over at him and grins, his teeth flashing. “Rock paper scissors?”

Amir wins with scissors and pats Evan on the back as he slides off his stool.

Mia makes Sunday order a water and watches her drink all of it, because she’s started to attract predatory stares from the middle-aged businessmen at the bar. At the same time, she keeps an eye on Amir as he takes Jason aside and starts whispering to him. Jason exclaims, “She is NOT,” then falls silent, his face getting pinker as Amir keeps talking. Finally, they both come back over — Jason looking shaken and Amir clearly working hard to maintain a somber look even as his eyes are twinking.

“Let’s go,” Jason says grimly.

Sunday sets her empty water glass down on the black marble bar with a clunk. “I’m ready,” she announces.

Angel leans over, looking hopeful. “Are we leaving?” she says.

“Sorry,” Jason says to her. “Family only wedding, apparently.”

“You’re all family?” she says, looking disbelieving.

“Yep,” Evan says, clapping Jason on the back. “Jason’s my cousin.”

“Sunday’s adopted,” Amir says.

“I am not,” Sunday exclaims.

“Not _adopted_ adopted,” he backpedals. “I mean our dad adopted you. You’re not my stepsister anymore, but you’re not a regular sister.”

“She is your regular sister, idiot,” Mia says. “Stop being obsessed with labels. Is Toni not a regular sister?”

“I just don’t want to confuse people,” Amir says. “‘Cos there's no resemblance.” He pauses a beat, for effect. “I’m very sophisticated, and Sunday’s covered in horse poop all the time.”

Sunday socks him in the arm, eliciting a laugh from the bartender that he tries to mask as a cough as he moves past them down the bar.

Amir pouts, rubbing his bicep. “I don’t think I like you when you’re drunk.”

“Tough titties.”

Angel starts to say something, but the rest of them gather up Jason in a protective phalanx and wave goodbye to her as they hurry him away.

“Bye Angel,” Jason calls forlornly.

“Forget it Jason,” Amir says. “It’s Chinatown.”

“But we’re in Vegas,” Jason says, sounding distracted as he continues to walk backwards and gaze at Angel.

Evan pulls him along by the back of his suit jacket. “Why did you tell a random woman in Vegas that your dad’s a billionaire?” he says. “That’s how you wake up on a plane to Libya with an envelope on your head.”

“She was nice!” Jason cries. His snapback has ridden comically up on his head; out of pity for him, Mia reaches up and tugs it back down.

“You can’t bring a hooker to my wedding, man,” Amir says. “Even a nice one.”

*

In the driverless Uber XL they take to the chapel, Amir and Evan sit in the bench seat up front, cuddling. They hold hands, and Evan nuzzles Amir’s head, making him tingle wherever his lips brush. Amir is the perfect amount of drunk right now, contented and warm, but still in possession of his faculties.

As the car moves along and the casinos along the Strip splash stupefying amounts of neon in through the windows, Amir watches the GPS visualization on the dashboard screen and half-listens to what’s going on in the backseat. Jason is drunkenly trying explain something about Wall Street, and Sunday keeps interrupting him even more drunkenly, to ask questions that Jason is too gone to answer. This exchange is punctuated by the occasional quiet laugh from Mia.

Amir turns his head and nuzzles Evan back, kissing his neck, reaching up to stroke his hair. He looks handsome in his tux. “You having any second thoughts?” he whispers to him.

“Nah,” Evan whispers back. “I’m actually psyched.”

“Me too. Hey… did you take your promise ring off?”

Evan looks down at his hand. “Oh, yeah. I figured I’d just replace it with the, uh, marriage ring. Wedding ring. Jesus.” He laughs. “I’m a little nervous.”

Amir smiles. “I took mine off too.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I had the same thought.”

CHAPEL OF THE FLOWERS, LAS VEGAS, AUGUST 11, 2039

They have to wait in the lobby of the chapel when they get there, since the wedding before them is running overlong. In comparison to the beautiful photos of the chapel Amir saw online, the lobby looks more like the lobby of a massage parlor. There are fake plants everywhere, and one of the walls is a hideous green.

Amir pays for the wedding package he’d ordered ($250, the costs just keep piling up) and hands the marriage license he and Evan picked up earlier over to the clerk, as well as both their IDs.

“Okay,” she says, snapping her gum at him. “Thanks. You can just go ahead and wait for the officiant to call you in.”

Amir’s nerves spike, and his empty stomach lurches. He nods at her, then goes over to everyone else, where they’ve crowded in a corner. Evan, Jason and Sunday are perched awkwardly on a little bench with not much room between them, while Mia stands with her arms folded, looking preoccupied.

“Nice, gentlemen,” Amir says to Evan and Jason. “Make a girl stand.”

“She wanted to!” Jason exclaims.

“I did,” Mia says, giving Amir a brotherly pinch. “My knee’s stiff.”

Sunday hiccups, then starts listing to starboard. Evan seizes her and rights her.

“And who let Sunday get this drunk?” Amir says.

“It’s my fault,” Sunday says, then hiccups again. “I don’t have a tolerance. I never have.”

Jason, who’s looking around glassy-eyed, announces, “I’m bored. I wanna go play video poker.”

“In a minute,” Evan says, sounding like someone’s father.

Jason sighs, then locks eyes on Mia and points at the Leica around her neck. “I have one of those,” he says.

“Really?” Mia says, sounding surprised.

“Yeah. You shoot medium format?”

“No, this is 35 milimeter,” Mia admits. “I wish I shot medium format. Especially when I went to Iceland.”

Mia’s photos from Iceland turned out beautiful, if amateurish, with a lot of the shots unfocused or overexposed or with a pink splotch of thumb at the edge of the frame. There were dozens of photos of Aya, smiling her blinding white smile against stunning backdrops of ancient ice formations and vast green hills. Amir feels bad for Mia, that her memories of that trip have all been tainted by their breakup. That’s always been one of his fears about breaking up with Evan for good, since he’s known him since he was seven. So many of his favorite memories have Evan in them.

And now they’re getting married. Promising to stay together for the rest of their lives. It hasn’t quite sunk in yet. Amir digs his nails into his palm, but he can’t bring himself to feel real fear; all he feels is anxiety about making the next half hour as special as he possibly can. He has to really be in the moment for once, which is hard for him.

Amir looks at Evan, wondering again what he’s feeling, but Evan is just listening to Mia and Jason talk about cameras and holding Sunday steady. He looks happy.

“Hey, Amir,” Jason says, breaking his reverie. “Were any of your professors at Juilliard like the guy in _Whiplash_?”

“Which guy?”

“The bald guy, duh.”

“Uh, nah, not really.”

Despite the relevant subject matter, Amir has only seen that movie once, and he barely remembers it, because he watched it with his high school jazz band friends and ended up making out with their hot tenor sax player almost the whole time. Chris Hollenbeck. Amir wonders what Chris is up to these days, then wonders if that’s an appropriate thing to be wondering at your wedding.

“What’s _Whiplash_?” Evan says.

“You haven’t seen that? It’s about this guy who goes to New York to study jazz, and he gets this crazy professor who’s jacked, and he like, throws furniture at him and makes him play for days and days...” Jason turns to the girls, who look blankly at him. “It’s a classic, come on! ‘Fuck off Johnny Utah, turn my pages bitch’?”

“Wait, you thought my professors threw furniture at me, man?” Amir says. “‘Cos... they did not.”

Mia and Sunday dissolve in drunken laughter.

“You had some tough ones senior year, though,” Evan says. “You got really intense, you don’t remember? You’d take like twelve hours to respond to a text, and I’d text Greg or Jordan, and they’d tell me you were in your room on the piano the whole time.”

“Yeah, well,” Amir says, flustered. “What, did you and Jason talk about that behind my back?”

Evan and Jason exchange a look.

“Nah, he just told me you didn’t really do anything besides music, this spring,” Jason says. “I asked.”

“Ask _me,_ if you want to know stuff about me.”

“You get pissed off when people ask you questions,” Jason says. “Case in point.”

“That is true, actually,” Mia says.

Luckily, at that moment their officiant swings the doors to the chapel open. He’s a deeply tanned, sort of ridiculous looking guy, like a televangelist. He’s dressed more like an auctioneer than a minister. The couple that was in there getting married scurries out behind him and heads for the door, chuckling with each other about something. Amir envies them for being married already. He wants so badly to just get it done and have it on the books. 

“Hello there!” the officiant booms in a Southern accent. “I’m Mikey. Y’all ready to get married?”

Evan stands and approaches Amir, touching his hand to his lower back. “Yeah.”

Sunday, Mia and Jason file into the chapel with their arms around each other, humming _Here Comes The Bride_ loud and offkey. Mikey, still grinning, steps aside to let them by, then hands Amir and Evan each a boutonniere.

Amir doesn’t have a lapel to pin his to, so he pulls the pin out and tucks the flower behind his ear. Evan smiles at this.

“Anyone want to walk down the aisle, or are we doing this egalitarian?” Mikey asks them. His breath smells overpoweringly of mint.

Amir reaches out and holds Evan’s hand. It’s a little sweaty. “We can just walk down together, I guess.”

Evan nods.

“Okay. Any requests for your musical cue? We got Spotify.”

Amir looks to Evan, who shrugs and says, “What’s that Talking Heads song we like?”

Amir laughs. “ _This Must Be the Place_?”

“Yeah. That’s, like, our song, right? If we had to pick one?”

“I mean, yeah. Talking Heads just isn’t very wedding-y.”

“Who gets to decide what’s wedding-y?”

Amir can’t argue with that logic, so he nods at Mikey, who gives them a thumbs up and disappears through the doors. From the momentary glimpse into the chapel, he can tell it’s as nice as it looked online, with a tented, glass-paneled ceiling and small trees lining the pews, buttressed by fairy lights.

Evan shifts again in his tuxedo, tugging at his bow tie and cummerbund. “I didn’t think this would be this uncomfortable,” he mutters. “Thought it would fit like a suit.”

“It’s a lot cheaper than the suits you’re used to.”

“That’s true. You comfortable?”

“I actually am.” Amir thumbs at the nath. “This is just heavy.”

“You look cool, though.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You should use one of the photos Mia gets for your first album cover.”

Amir smiles. “I like that idea.”

Evan smiles back at him, and then the familiar synth line of their wedding music starts echoing into the lobby.

“You go in now,” the clerk calls from her office.

“Thanks for that,” Amir mutters, making Evan laugh.

They push through the doors and start walking down the aisle, grinning from how ludicrous it all is, but from happiness too. Sunday throws flower petals at them as they go by, and Mia is leaning backwards in one of the pews, snapping photos while Jason begs her to change her f-stop.

They reach the end of the aisle, where Mikey awaits against a stone arch facade covered in fake plants. He reaches out and arranges Amir and Evan with awkward yanks and tugs on their shoulders and arms until they’re facing each other in front of him, holding both of each other’s hands.

Amir heart is bursting with affection as he looks up at Evan (who’s beaming) but he also feels a little goofy and self-conscious, the way he does on stage if he’s sober.

“Do I have to look at him the whole time?” he asks Mikey, prompting laughs from Jason and his sisters, and a “Thanks, Meer,” from Evan.

“It’s just that it’s awkward,” Amir adds. “Don’t worry, I’m used to your dumb face.”

Evan laughs.

“Look wherever you want, kid,” Mikey whispers, slipping from his over-the-top persona for a second. Then he booms “Dearly beloved!” and snaps a piece of gum in his mouth. “We are gathered here today in the presence of these witnesses, to join Evan Stewart and Amir Tomlinson-Ma… Hmm.”

“Malik.”

“— Malik, thank you, in holy matrimony! If any person can show just cause why these two should not be joined together, let them speak now or forever hold their peace."

“They’re degenerates,” Jason heckles, and Sunday laughs.

Amir gives them all the finger.

“Amir ate dog food once,” Mia yells.

“You _made_ me do that!”

“And who made you eat my horse’s food?” Sunday challenges.

Amir laughs. “It smelled good, I just wanted to try it! Don’t lie to me that you’ve never tried it!”

“Alri-ighty,” Mikey says, gently interrupting. “Both of you take a ring...” He digs the rings Amir had pre-purchased out of his breast pocket, and hands one to each of them. “And repeat after me. I, Amir, give you, Evan, this ring as a token of my eternal devotion… with it, I thee wed.”

Amir looks up at Evan, who looks so serious that he falters for a moment, getting lost in his eyes. “I, Amir,” he says haltingly, fumbling from nerves as he slides it into Evan’s finger, “give you, Evan, this ring as a token of my eternal devotion. It, um — sorry — with it, I thee wed.”

“I, Evan,” Mikey says, and repeats the vow. Evan recites it back, sliding the gold ring onto Amir’s finger. The soft shutter sound of Mia’s camera keeps echoing, distant in his awareness. He can hear the blood rushing in his head.

“You’re shaking,” Evan whispers, squeezing his hand.

“Just can’t believe we’re doing this,” Amir whispers back, and looks up at him again. He remembers all the reasons he thought this was the right thing to do, and his doubts start to fade the way a bad dream does. He’s desperate to leave this chapel now, to go out in the world and be married to Evan there.

His husband. He has a husband _._ It’s so serious and adult that Amir feels altered by the very idea. He feels like he’s been welcomed into something solemn and massive, an overwhelming marble structure filled with the ghosts of everyone who came before him. He just changed the trajectory of his life, he knows it.

“ _And you love me till my heart stops_ ,” David Byrne’s voice wails over the speaker system. “ _Love me till I'm dead_ …”

Amir feels his eyes start to glisten. Evan lets go of one hand and reaches up to wipe a tear away from his cheek.

“By the power vested in me,” Mikey booms, “I now pronounce you legally married in the eyes of the state of Nevada and the United States government. Congratulations.”

Amir, dizzied, stares at him. “That’s it?”

Mikey claps him on the shoulder. “That’s it, kid. We’ll send the certificate to the email address you gave us. Y’all go enjoy Las Vegas.”

Mia, Sunday and Jason cheer. Evan pulls Amir along by the hand then wraps his arm around his waist, his fingers tickling Amir where they land on the exposed skin of his stomach.

Their witnesses pelt rice at them as they head back down the aisle. Mia and Sunday must have made a special trip to go get rice and flower petals, earlier. That’s sweet of them.

He glances up at Evan, who looks pensive. “You feel different?”

“A little,” Evan admits. “D’you?”

“Yeah. I just keep thinking, like… if you’d told me five years ago that we were gonna do this…”

“I know,” Evan says. “Me neither. I mean — you know what I mean.”

Amir laughs dizzily. “Yeah.”

There’s a thrumming excitement in the air when they all pile into a waiting Uber, loudly talking over each other about where they should go next and shoving their phones in each other’s faces to share Yelp reviews of various casinos and nightlife spots.

Amir gets a text and checks his watch; Louis has said into their family group chat, _show was aces! and that’s a wrap on the tour !!!!!_

 _:))))))_ Liam writes back almost instantaneously.

Amir finds himself missing Liam suddenly, which is funny. He’s always kept him too far at arm’s length to truly miss him, before. But maybe he has more perspective now or something. He likes Liam for most of the same kind of reasons he likes Sunday, he’s realizing. It just took growing out of his resentful stepkid mindset to realize it.

Amir sends a sunglasses emoji in response to Louis’ text at the same time that Mia does the same thing in the backseat. They lean over to look at each other and exchange a grin.

“Oh, by the way,” Jason says. “I hit up Mia’s friend, and I picked up our nose beers while Evan’s tux was getting fitted.”

He lifts his hand and dangles a baggie of coke from it. They all stare up at it, like it’s a grim harbinger of the night ahead.

*

First they all have to get drunker, since the wedding is out of the way and they won’t have to pretend at seemliness for the rest of the night. Their mission has been completed.

At one of the Bellagio’s massive bars, Amir and Sunday curl up on a couch together and sip $30 craft cocktails while the other three, who are all hungry, try their luck ordering food at the crowded bar.

They’re surrounded by opulence; the mirrored walls reflect the wooden ceilings and plush gold and mahogany decor. They also make it hard to tell how large the room is; it could be as small as his daadi and daada’s cozy sitting room, or literally endless. The couches are as soft as pudding, the way expensive ones always are. As he gets drunker, Amir keeps running his hands over the fabric. It feels so good under his palms.

Soon he’ll be ready for coke, but not now. He needs to be drunk enough to be completely calm, or the coke will make him anxious. It didn’t used to, but his anxiety has been getting worse lately, as the world has begun to take real notice of him.

“These taste so good,” Sunday says of the cocktail in her hand.

“I’m cutting you off after that one,” Amir says.

She laughs. “I’m soberer now. Sober… er… more sober. I ate a protein bar.”

“Good.”

She gives him a once-over, her dark eyes dancing from the alcohol. “D’you feel different?”

Amir nods, twisting his wedding band. It’s cheap and gold-plated, and he’ll probably replace it with a ring made of a cool metal when he has the time to pick one out. Tungsten or cobalt or something. But it’s nice enough for now. He likes looking at it on his hand; it calms him.

“I do,” he murmurs. “Not in a bad way. Just in a different way. And also I kind of don’t. You remember, um… when you turned thirteen right before me, and I asked if you felt different? And you said you did, but you also didn’t?”

“You ask me that before every big birthday,” Sunday says, sounding amused. “Ten, thirteen, eighteen, twenty-one. It feels like that?”

“Yeah, that’s what it feels like.”

They go quiet for a moment. They’re often quiet together, the two of them. They’re comfortable in each other’s silences. Amir feels nice, his head buzzing pleasantly, cocooned in the sparkling bar and surrounded by the low chatter of conversations, with jazz (albeit smooth jazz) playing over the speakers.

“Jason asked me if you’re single,” Amir says, glancing up at her.

She just laughs.

“He meant it, for real. Don’t worry, he’s scared of me and Mia, so he’s not gonna ask you out, or anything. But he’s still interested, for the record.”

“I don’t get what he sees in me,” Sunday says, with a regal shake of her head. “I’m sure there are a million beautiful women in New York who all want his money.”

Amir smiles at her. The alcohol is making him more sincere than normal. “You’re not like most people. You’re a serious kind of person, you’re not fake, you don’t fuck around. Even someone like him can appreciate that.”

She stares down at the drink in her hand, then swirls it around so the ice clinks against the glass. “I always thought that was a bad thing, not being like everyone else.”

“Why would you think that?”

Sunday shrugs. “I dunno. I wasn’t popular at school like you and Mia were.”

“You didn’t want to be,” Amir points out.

“It would have been nice.”

“You only think that ‘cos you didn’t try to get it. It was so pointless, honestly.”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” Sunday insists.

“Then what are you saying? ‘Cos you could’ve been, is my point. You had money like us, you had famous parents like us, people think you’re pretty.”

“People think?” she says, laughing.

“I mean, to me you’re disgusting, but yeah, my friends used to ask about you. Not just Jason. Plus we were always inviting you to parties, you always said no.”

She shrugs.

Amir twists his wedding ring harder. “You keep people at a distance,” he says. “You know that, right?”

Her face is unusually unguarded from drinking, and he can see that hearing this causes her pain. “Of course I know that.”

“Well, so I’m saying it’s not because people don’t like you that you don’t connect with them. People like you. You’re just very surface-level a lot of the time. You’re surface-level with _me_ ,” he says, and is surprised to realize that he’s harboring some hurt feelings on the subject.

Sunday shrugs. She sets her drink on the table with a _thunk_ and pulls her knees to her chest, resting the side of her face on them.

Amir feels like he’s driving her further inside herself with his aggressive babbling, which is more of a Mia move, but he can’t help it. “You’re like that with Dad, even.”

This obviously rankles. “You don’t know the kind of stuff me and him talk about. I asked him to adopt me, that’s not surface-level.”

“Fourteen years, though, you held him away for fourteen years before you did that.”

Tears gather in Sunday’s eyes. Without realizing he’s doing it, Amir moves down the couch to comfort her. He wraps his arms around her, and she buries her face against his shoulder.

“You don’t get it,” she mumbles.

“Don’t cry,” Amir says tipsily. He reaches up and thumbs a tear away. “Is it about your mom?”

Sunday shrugs helplessly. Amir strokes her back.

She doesn’t talk about this much — not to Amir, anyway — but she’s been pretty thoroughly on the outs with Ceci ever since Louis adopted her. Even though Sunday hadn’t disowned her mother or anything, Cecilia acted like this was the ultimate betrayal. And maybe in a way it was, but an understandable one.

They only talk at holidays now, and Amir doesn’t know the last time they saw each other in person. Maybe when Sunday competed at Young Riders, because apparently Ceci did come to that, but she spent the entire weekend avoiding Louis and giving her daughter and ex-husband the silent treatment. When she did talk to Liam, she called him a gutless, conniving shitbag, which according to Sunday, Liam was terribly upset about before he was able to move on and start laughing about it instead.

“Dad understands, though,” Amir says, in a kind of apology. “He loves you. He’s always called you his. Even back before they were married, he’d tell people he had five kids.”

Sunday laughs in a breathy hiccup. “I know he did.”

“I’m not saying you do anything wrong. I’m just saying you can’t get mad that people aren’t accepting something you aren’t giving them.”

“I know,” she says in a soft voice. “I don’t even know why I’m crying.”

“It’s the vodka.”

“Oh, right.”

They sit there for a little while longer, hugging. Amir feels good and adult in comforting someone, when he so badly wants to be comforted and reassured himself. Cocaine will do both, though.

When they draw back, Amir’s nath is caught up in her curly hair. They laugh and work to untangle it with nimble but sloppy fingers.

Sunday wipes her eyes and says, “I’m actually not single. So you should probably tell Jason.”

Amir is fairly astonished. Sunday has never mentioned this before. “Really?”

She nods. Her cheeks are pink.

“Does Mia know?”

She shakes her head.

“Whaaaat! Tell me, tell me, tell me.” He leans against the back of the couch and kicks his feet up on the table. He can see Evan, Mia and Jason over at the bar, chatting while they eat their hamburgers; he feels distant from them, but in a nice, comforting way. A way where he knows that if he stood up and went over there, they’d all be happy to see him.

“It’s Julio,” Sunday says. “You might have met him? He works for Lionel.”

These names swim thickly in Amir’s inebriated head. Lionel is involved somehow in coaching Sunday, he remembers that much, a big fancy Olympian who keeps talented young equestrians like vassals in exchange for the gift of his wisdom.

“Lionel,” he repeats.

“Yeah, he was the _chef d'equipe_ for the French national team.”

“He was the _what_?”

“Never mind. Do you remember Julio?”

“Maybe,” Amir says, and then remembers a really young and handsome guy, a little shorter than Sunday, with a bright smile. He met him in the spring, maybe, sometime between graduation and his fellowship, when he and Mia had gotten very high and accompanied Sunday when she went to ride in a little show somewhere out in wine country. Julio had fetched Sunday’s saddle for her, and given her a leg up into it. “The guy with the dragon tattoo?”

“Yes.”

“I liked him! He’s your groom, right?”

“He’s not a groom anymore, he’s a working student now. He’s a really talented horseman, great rider.”

“So what do you guys do together?” Amir says. “You ride horses?”

Sunday shrugs. “Sometimes, but mostly we talk. We talk a lot, actually.”

Amir can’t imagine any situation where Sunday could be said to talk _a lot_. This guy must be a wizard. “About what? Horses?”

“Life,” she says simply.

“Where’s he live?”

“At Lionel’s Napa stables. He rents a room in one of the barns.”

“You go visit him there?”

“Yeah.”

“And you talk. And ride horses.”

“Yeah. Sometimes we go galloping at night, in the fog. It’s cool.”

Amir is flabbergasted. “How long you been doing that for?”

“A few months now.”

“For a few months now? You and Julio? Me and Julio down by the schoolyard?”

“Don’t make fun of his name!”

“I’m not! It’s a very famous song!”

Sunday rolls her eyes.

“Wow,” Amir says. “Sunday has a secret groom boyfriend.”

“Stop,” she says, her eyes flashing. “Don’t be mean about him.”

“I’m not!”

“His parents got deported, he doesn’t have any family here. He’s a good guy. He’s totally different from everyone else I know.”

“You really like him, huh?”

“What makes you say that?”

“You’re all protective and shit.”

Sunday laughs and shrugs. “I guess I am.”

“Why keep it a secret, then?”

“It just didn’t feel like anyone’s business,” she says. “And I’m afraid of the whole big, crazy family thing scaring him off. But since you threw a tantrum about how I never tell you anything…”

Amir laughs. “That was not a tantrum!”

“Uh-huh.”

“Where’d his parents come here from?”

“The Dominican Republic. He was born here, though.”

“But does he speak Spanish? Do you guys speak Spanish together?”

Her face gets pink, for some reason. “He’s taught me a little.”

“Yeah?” Amir says cheerfully, easily recalling his years in school immersion before he got to high school and wanted to try Latin. “ _Cómo de bueno es tu español?_ ”

Sunday looked pained. “Um. _Estoy bien_?”

He laughs. “Tell Julio he has a lot of work to do. What else do you know?”

“I know, like, _besitos para ti_ ,” she says. “And he calls me _cielo_ , and _hermosa...”_

“Yeah? He must like you back.”

Sunday gets pinker and looks away.

Jason, Evan and Mia come swaggering back over to them, then, picking through the crowd of drunk gamblers and laughing with each other as they do. They stop at the edge of the able and look expectantly at Amir and Sunday.

Looking at Mia with the new eyes of inebriation, Amir realizes she looks older. Her face is altered in some way; maybe because she’s lost weight, or maybe it’s because she blew out her black hair pin-straight for the evening, instead of throwing it up in a ponytail like normal.

It’s jarring to notice his only slightly older sister aging right in front of him. It makes life feel like an incredibly fast joke.

“Take a picture,” Mia says to him, noticing his stare.

“I’m just thinking about something,” Amir says.

“What?”

“How life is really weird.”

“Amen to that.”

*

They decide to rent a private karaoke booth, all the better to do cocaine in. At this point Amir is rapidly hemorrhaging money, but he tells Mia that their parents can forgive him for a little bit of insane spending coming on the tailwind of a year full of professional success, and it’s not like either of them are good with money, either. She represses an eyeroll and says okay, mostly to avoid being called Mom again. Whatever. It’s his life.

In the dark, neon-blue karaoke booth, they all pile onto the wraparound vinyl couch and wait for the Bellagio attendant who escorted them to it to close the door behind her. Once she has, Jason pulls the baggie from his pocket and dumps half of the coke onto the table, arranging it in small lines.

“Go slow, you guys,” Sunday says softly.

“I’m not even doing any,” Evan says, lounging back on the couch.

“No coke for Evan?” Jason says, looking surprised. “No coke for pussyboy?”

“I haven’t done coke since we got arrested, man,” Evan says. “That’s high school shit. I’ll help babysit, though.”

“You won’t have to babysit,” Mia objects. “Not _me_ anyway, I dunno about anyone else.”

“I can handle myself,” Amir says. “Worry about Jason.”

“‘Scuse me,” Jason protests. He slides off the couch and kneels beside the table, then with a practiced motion that leaves no doubt about his extracurricular activities as a finance bro, inhales one line and then another.

“Hey,” Amir says. “Coke hog.”

“I bought it!”

“Yeah, as a wedding present!”

Mia watches with some worry as Amir leans over and snorts his own line.

He sits up and shakes his head, blinking. “Jesus,” he says. “That’s pretty good shit.”

“You're welcome,” Jason replies.

Mia hasn’t done coke since one ill-fated night at UCLA, when she ended up getting in a terrible fight with her roommate as a result, so she uses Jason’s Amex Black to push half of her line over to him, then snorts what’s left.

It stings her nose like inhaling ammonia, and she rubs at her nostrils, sniffing hard.

Sunday and Evan are looking over at them, mildly curious.

“It’s fine,” Mia says, although she can’t exactly guarantee that. She sniffs and blinks again — the neon lights are blurring.

“You sure you don’t want any, Sunday?” Jason says.

“No,” Amir answers for her, sounding protective. “She’s the responsible one.”

Mia sniffs a third time. “‘Scuse me,” she says. “I’m the responsible one.”

“You’re responsible for other people,” Amir says. “But Sunday is _responsible_ responsible.”

“What does that mean?” Sunday says.

“Like, okay, if Dad and Liam died tomorrow, Mia would get custody of the twins, no doubt,” Amir says. “But if I need a designated driver? I’m calling Sunday.”

Mia and Sunday glance at each other, amused.

“Yeah, that’s fair,” Mia says, as Sunday nods.

Amir slides open the drawer in the table and pulls out the karaoke remote and a mic, then turns the massive wall plasma on. It boots up, showing text in both English and, presumably, Japanese.

“What do we want to sing?” he says, rubbing at his own nose and accidentally tugging the nath, then wincing. “Ugh. I might take this out…”

“No,” Evan protests. “Leave it, I like it.”

Amir smiles in the darkness. “Alright.”

“You and Evan get first pick,” Mia says generously. “Do a duet.”

Amir squints up at the television, which is showing a selection of bobbleheaded avatars to choose from. “What, is it like a game?”

“Yeah, I think you have to hit the right notes,” Sunday says. “And then your character gets points.”

“Sunday understands Japanese, now,” Mia says.

Sunday laughs. “I was reading the English! You guys just aren’t paying attention.”

“Cokeheads don’t pay attention,” Evan says tipsily. “Amir, I wanna be the little pink hair chick.”

“Okay, okay,” Amir mutters, and starts selecting characters for all of them, inputting their names.

“Why would you pick a redhead boy for me?” Mia exclaims.

“‘Cos that’s who I picked,” Amir says. “Get over it.”

Jason snorts the half of a line that Mia abandoned and straightens up. “Why am I a little blue alien?”

“Stop questioning me!”

For Sunday, he picks a completely accurate avatar of a white girl with curly chestnut hair.

“Thanks, Meer,” she says from the corner, sounding amused.

For himself, Amir inexplicably picks a cat.

“Done,” he says with pride.

Jason grabs a pillow and flops onto his stomach. The neon and the glow from the TV flicker on his face. “So this is karaoke with actual singing talent required? I kind of hate that.”

“Yeah, Amir and Sunday are gonna slaughter the rest of us,” Mia says.

She can feel the coke beginning to tickle her, washing away her worries and making words come more quickly to her tongue. It’s like her brain is sinking into a hot bath after being out in the cold all day.

“It probably just gives you points for big energy,” Sunday says. “It wouldn’t be fair, otherwise.”

Amir picks _Don’t Go Breaking My Heart_ for him and Evan to start with. They argue over who has to be Kiki Dee (Amir ends up getting bullied into it) then quickly realize that Sunday is right — the louder and more passionate you are, the more points you get.

Mia sits there delighted, coked out and drunk, watching Evan and Amir frantically scream in call and response as their on-screen characters battle for dominance, knocking each other off the animated stage whenever one of them racks up a bunch of points at once.

The animated shoving bleeds into real-life microphone-grabbing. Amir climbs up onto the table to escape from Evan, and Evan tackles him onto the couch, knocking his mic out of his hand just as the song ends.

Giggling and sweaty, Amir points at the screen and yells, “Ha! I won anyway!”

Evan blows a raspberry on his exposed stomach, and then they start making out right there between Mia and Jason, who exchange an upset look.

“Me and Mia next,” Sunday says.

Mia hands her her assigned mic. “What song?”

She shrugs, her body language loose and pliable. “I can’t think of anything.”

“You know what we should do,” Evan says. Mia turns to him, and he’s sitting up, with Amir clinging to him like a koala. “We should see what One Direction songs they have.”

“No,” Amir groans.

“No, that’s actually hilarious,” Jason says, in a somewhat coke-crazed way. His pupils are huge. “Do it.”

Mia turns to Sunday, who smiles and shrugs. “Sure, why not?”

“Oh my God,” Mia says, but she finds herself laughing. She’s in a very good mood. “Yeah, sure.”

Amir punches in _One Direction_ on the remote and starts scrolling. “Nice, these are all for five singers,” he says. “Most of them, anyway...”

“Well, yeah.”

Amir scrolls more, then starts laughing.

“What?” Evan says to him.

“Nothing,” he says. “Today’s just been funny. Do we know any of these?”

Mia squints at the screen as song titles flash by. “Not the recent stuff, I don’t know any of the recent stuff.”

“Me neither,” Sunday says. She scoots over to Mia and leans in close, resting her head on her shoulder. Mia is struck by pleasant surprise, like a butterfly has landed on her.

They pick _I Would_ , since Mia and Amir have foggy memories of listening to it in the car as kids. They’re all too far gone and too competitive to worry about corniness; they scream-sing the chorus together into their individual mics (“IIIIIIII WOOOO- _UUUUUUULD_!”), and whenever one of them gets a solo they all tackle that person and hit them with pillows, trying to get them to fuck up. Amir ends up wedging himself underneath the couch to sing Louis’ part in relative safety, so Sunday and Mia drop to the floor and bat at him like giant cats, wanting to knock the microphone out of his hand.

By the end of the song, they’re all panting and exhausted, and Evan has come from behind for a surprise win. He cheers, taking off his bow tie and whipping it at the screen, where his avatar is curtsying on the stage while roses are thrown at her.

“It’s because he got Pops’s part,” Amir yells in complaint from underneath the couch. “He had the longest solo, so he had the most opportunities for points. It’s just math.”

Mia kicks at him under the couch. “Will you get out of there?”

“No, I’m safe down here.”

Evan glances over at Mia, grinning. “I’ll get him.”

“Do it,” she says. “Drag his bony ass out, he’s easy to drag.”

“Drag him! Drag him!” Sunday says like a WWE announcer, making Mia and Jason laugh.

“Cancel him,” Mia says.

“No!” Amir yells when Evan leans over the edge of the couch and starts tugging on the shoulder of his kurta. “I’m a target! I’m the best singer, so you’re all targeting me!”

“The scores aren’t based on talent!” Evan yells back, yanking Amir out and straddling him, wrangling his squirming body like he’s a freshly caught fish.

“But it’s about lung power, and I smoke all of you on stamina,” Amir yells muffledly into the carpet.

“Hey, I don’t want to hear about your stamina,” Jason says, hitting his Juul.

Evan and Amir are rolling around on the floor giggling, now, and they kiss for a while as Mia scrolls through the catalog for a new song. Her brain feels stiff, like the act of pumping out the dopamine that’s comforting and pleasing her is making it less plastic. Her skin is tingling, and her nose is too; the screen doesn’t quite look real, although that might be a side effect of the karaoke game’s garish color scheme and inclusion of Japanese translations beside the English writing.

Evan sits back down beside her, and Amir collapses in his lap.

“Do _Best Song Ever,”_ Sunday suggests.

“Ugh, no, awful,” Amir says.

“That’s why it’ll be funny,” Mia says, and selects it.

While it’s loading, Amir says, sounding sort of manic: “You guys are having fun, right? I wanted everyone to have fun today.”

“Of course, dummy,” Mia says.

“It’s _your_ wedding,” Sunday points out.

“I know.” Amir plays with one of Evan’s cufflinks. Evan watches him with amused interest as he does. “I just want everyone to have fun.”

“I feel great,” Jason announces. “But I’m fucking lasered, truth be told.”

They all laugh at this, and Amir smiles.

*

After all of them but Sunday have smoked some of Mia’s weed to either ease the coke comedown or, in Evan’s case, put a mellow cap on the night, they head out to the club that’s on the same floor.

Mia doesn’t really feel like dancing, but it feels good to stand on the dance floor, which has perfectly crisp air conditioning blowing down from the ceiling onto the sweaty dancers as they writhe in a teeming mass. The ceilings in this place are incredibly tall, and it’s more of the same dark neon colors, smearing in your wasted eyes.

Amir and Evan take up in the middle of the floor, slow-dancing while making out despite the 150 BPM song that the DJ is spinning. Mia and Sunday stay on the sidelines and watch Jason as he staggers through the crowd, his eyes glazed.

“Should keep an eye on him,” Mia shouts over the music.

Sunday leans in. “He’s not your responsibility,” she yells back. “He’s an adult.”

Mia considers this, then nods. “You’re right.”

Sunday sips a glass of ice water she snagged at the bar. “Wait, is this a remix of my dad?” she adds, pointing upward as if to indicate the music.

Mia listens for a moment, then laughs and nods. “Yeah.”

“We can’t ever get away from them, can we?”

“Nope.”

*

Amir feels dizzy as he dances with Evan, from the coke but also from a powerful affection for him. It’s like being caught up by ocean waves. He can’t stop gazing at Evan’s face, even though it’s so familiar.

“Hi,” Amir shouts at him over the music.

“Hi,” Evan yells back, his white teeth gleaming in the neon darkness.

Amir presses into him, resting against his chest and shoulder, and leans in to whisper in his ear. “I love you.”

Evan squeezes him close, rubbing his hands up and down Amir’s back. “I love you too.”

Amir takes one of those hands and presses their palms together, splaying out their fingers. “We have to go on a honeymoon,” he says, raising his voice again over the pumping bass.

“We have to?”

“I want to, I mean.”

“Oh, yeah, me too. Where?”

“I wanna snowboard Vail with you again,” Amir says.

“Yeah, sure, but that’s a winter trip. Where d’you wanna go right now?”

“You decide,” Amir shouts.

Evan looks like he’s thinking about it, rubbing Amir’s back with the hand that isn’t pressed to his palm. He slides it up the back of his neck and tickles him there, rubbing his shorter hair against the grain, making Amir tingle. “Thailand.”

“ _Thailand_?”

“Yeah! It’s one of the only places I’ve never been, and it’s so cool.”

“Word, I’ve never been there either.”

Evan smiles. “Alright, let’s go.”

Amir likes it when he’s bossy. “You’re on,” he shouts.

*

It’s the second bump of coke Mia takes that sends her over the edge, into the underworld of bad decisions.

She knows about five minutes after it hits. She had made her way to Jason through the dance floor crowd, getting elbowed and knocked into by people way more fucked up than her, and gestured at her nose before tugging the baggie out of his breast pocket. She took a quick hit out of the crook of her thumb, the way she’d seen some of her UCLA teammates do at parties, then licked the rest off. It made her mouth unpleasantly numb, but the high hit a lot faster than normal.

When they made their way downstairs to the casino, standing numbly in the massive elevator, Mia noticed she was truly fucked up. It was a giddy realization. She let herself go, like a balloon into the sky.

*

Sunday is curious about gambling, although in the detached, mild way she’s curious about most disreputable things. The high of flying over four foot fences or going forty miles an hour on the back of a horse is enough for her.

She has a shrimp cocktail at the bar, then sits with Evan and Amir at the poker table for a while, until Evan goes off to join Jason at the slot machines and Amir starts losing.

“Can you go get Evan back?” Amir says quietly to her, flicking a chip between his fingers and staring with dismay down at the three cards the dealer just laid out on the green fabric. “He was making me lucky.”

Sunday laughs and says sure, then heads off across the casino floor, moving past businessmen in suits and tourists in khaki shorts. The lights in here pound down on you in a disorientingly even glow, leaving no pockets of shadow, like their goal is to keep you walking in circles.

She realizes as she walks that people are giving her lingering looks, maybe checking her out. She doesn’t normally get that, since she’s always wearing barn clothes and rushing from place to place with her head down. She never tries to be noticed, but Mia had braided her hair fancy and slathered makeup on her, and also lent her a top that’s too short on Sunday’s longer torso and is exposing part of her stomach.

She lets the grasping eyes slip over her like water and fall away. Halfway to the slot machines, she spots Mia sitting at a blackjack table, looking unwell. Huge pupils almost crowd out her light irises, and her face is unusually pale. She’s toying with a chip the same way Amir was.

Sunday sits down on the empty seat between her and an older, finely dressed woman. “Mims,” she whispers, ignoring a sidelong glance from the woman.

Mia’s quiet for a moment, then says, “What?” hoarsely.

“What’s up? You okay?”

The words seem to travel to her from a significant distance.

“I’m down,” Mia finally says, her jaw stiff.

“By how much?”

Mia looks up at the dealer, who shrugs. “About ten grand,” he says.

Sunday’s stomach drops. “ _What_? How?”

“I dunno,” she says, sounding defensive. “Whatever! I can make it back. I’ll start winning again.”

“No,” Sunday says, worried enough to decisively call an audible. “We’re going upstairs.”

“No,” Mia says back, stubbornly, sounding like she’s four. “I’m gonna win. Go away.”

“You’re not going to win. You’re just going to lose more money. This is a casino, they’re thieves and liars.” Sunday feels panicked, like she’s the only person in the world who sees how venal and hollow things like casinos and cocaine are.

“Hey,” the dealer says, looking sternly at her. He’s very large, with fishy eyes and a graying goatee.

“You should be ashamed,” Sunday snaps at him. “She’s obviously too messed up to be gambling.”

The older woman titters at this, like it’s too earnest for her to react to with anything but contempt.

Sunday pulls Mia up by her arm. Mia, to her relief, goes limp and lets herself be dragged. “We’re going upstairs,” she says, with enough force in her voice that Mia nods.

The dealer holds a hand up and pulls in Mia’s remaining chips with a little rake, then hands Sunday some cash — about $900.

“Thanks,” Sunday says to him — politely, because she’s a polite person even when she’s furious at bastards.

They move away toward the elevators, past tables full of people with chips clicking loudly in dealers’ hands, past roulette tables where guys are waving thick stacks of cash. All of it feels so soulless compared to earlier, compared to the lifelong camaraderie the five of them had shared in the karaoke room, and compared to the emotional intensity of Evan and Amir eloping. She wishes desperately that she was outside in the night air, instead of being trapped in this cramped lamb pen of sadsacks.

*

Back in their room, Mia throws up for a while before curling up on the bathroom floor and crying. Sunday pets her hair and her back the whole time, but she doesn’t know what to say, if anything. She doesn’t have much experience with this — her equestrian friends hold their liquor very well. A lot of them are secret alcoholics, in truth.

Sunday isn’t as naive as her siblings think; equestrianism is rotted at its core by eating disorders, sexual abuse from coaches, and drug use. She’s just managed to hide from all of that, to keep her head down like she always has. She’s always running away. When she was a kid and her mother would take custody of her for a random weekend, then throw a massive Hollywood party, she would run out to the pool and hide behind the deck chairs to get away from it all. Ceci would peer over from a group of friends on the patio and crow, with her bravado hiding her hurt: “There’s my daughter! Always hiding from me! Isn’t that funny? Her father taught her that.”

Liam had never taught her that. He barely discusses her mother with her at all. He’s always trying not to intrude; he’s practically erased himself from the life the three of them once had, like he had been a butler or a chauffeur the whole time instead of the presumed head of the household.

While Mia is crying, Sunday uses her free hand to text Louis, _Mia drank too much, she’s pretty sick. anything i should do?_

_Ohhh what fun! she fancies a ginger ale when she’s sick :) is she puking?_

_lol yeah. a lot_

_make sure she falls asleep on her side?_

_okay got it_

_thanks for taking care of our girl x_

_of course_ , Sunday writes back, then hesitates for a moment before beginning to type again. She’s still drunk enough to say it: _Love you dad_

 _Love you too sweetheart xxxxxxxxx,_ he responds immediately.

She’s relieved, stupidly. He adopted her, of course he wouldn’t mind her calling him Dad. And besides, it’s Louis, who would probably let anyone call him Dad.

Mia sniffs and says, “Sunday?”

“Yeah?”

“Nothing… just wanted to make sure you were still there…”

Sunday looks bemusedly at her hand, which is petting Mia’s shoulder and has been for at least ten minutes. “Uh, yeah.”

Mia jerks up into a sitting position and wipes at her mouth.

“Want some water?” Sunday offers.

“No.” Mia gets unsteadily to her feet. “I wanna… I wanna smash stuff.”

“Wait,” Sunday protests, laughing and leaping up gracefully to follow her as she storms out of the bathroom. “Mia, come on. Let’s just go to bed.”

Amir is texting her, making her watch ping. _Where are you guys? Come on dooooooown to the pool_

“No,” Mia says. Her face is dark with anger, her blue eyes pale and gleaming from crying. She picks up a coffee mug from the minibar and looks at it for a moment. Then with the quick reflexes of an athlete, she chucks it at a wall where it loudly shatters.

Sunday winces and lunges for her, grabbing her arm. “Mia, Mia, Mia! We can’t trash our hotel room.”

“Why not?” Mia slurs. “It’s the Bellagio. They can deal.”

“What are you so mad about?”

Mia yanks away from her, then picks up a glass and flings it at the floor, where it luckily just bounces off the carpet. “ _What do you think?”_

“I don’t know! I really don’t! Mia, please, come on.”

“I’m such a fucking clown! I really am!”

“What does that mean?” Sunday begs her.

Mia, trembling, shakes her head. “Nothing I do matters! Nothing! Everything I do is for fucking everyone else!”

“Mia, it matters! Even if you do stuff for other people, that matters!”

“How? Aya didn’t give a shit about me, my brother doesn’t give a shit what I think, he doesn’t care if I think he shouldn’t get married, he doesn’t want to listen to me, anything I say, right? I’m trapped in this dead-end fucking career that I let my dad push me into, ‘cos it’s his childhood dream!” Her voice reaches a hoarse, screeching fever pitch. “And I’m always trying to fix everyone’s shit ‘cos I feel like it’s my job! I feel like no one would give a shit about me if I wasn’t, but no one does anyway!”

She picks up another glass and flings it at their large window that overlooks the Strip. That one shatters.

Sunday has had enough of this. She grabs Mia by the shoulders and forces her over to the bed, using being taller to her advantage. She bullies a squirming Mia down onto the sheets and pins her there.

“Stop smashing stuff!” she shouts in her face. “You’re being a brat!”

Mia, who’s now crying, blinks up at her like she’s never seen her before.

“Listen,” Sunday says firmly, “I know you got in a fight and you don’t want to talk about it, and you broke up and you don’t want to talk about it, and you don’t like that you’re living back home but you don’t know what else to do, but guess what? Everyone goes through that shit, okay? So why don’t you just talk about it? Instead of losing ten thousand dollars gambling and smashing stuff that some maid has to clean up?”

Tears stream down Mia’s pathetic face, and this stabs at Sunday’s heart, but she stays stern. They fall quiet, breathing heavily. Sunday removes her hands from Mia’s wrists.

“You’re really strong,” Mia murmurs.

“Well, you weigh a lot less than horses do.”

They both laugh. Sunday falls on her side next to Mia on the bed. More tears leak from Mia’s eyes, and she reaches over to wipe them away.

“I’m sorry,” Mia slurs. “I’m rinsed. All this shit is just… coming up.”

“It’s okay.”

“No it’s not. I’m the big sister. I’m not supposed to do this.”

“I can take care of you sometimes. I can take over for you taking care of everybody else for a while, okay? It’s fine.” Sunday clears her throat. “I’ve been gone for most of the last, like, what… four years? I’ve been on the road so long. It actually feels nice to come back and sort of, I dunno. Feel needed.”

Mia meets her eyes. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I missed you guys.”

“We missed you too.” Mia pauses, then adds, somewhat accusatory: “Didn’t think you missed us as much.”

“Well, I did.”

They’re quiet for a moment.

“Aya didn’t want to hurt you, you know,” Sunday says. “She just did what she had to do for her career.”

More tears fall. “But she left,” Mia says mournfully.

“I know, but she loved you.”

The tears grow fatter, and Mia is making little-kid noises of discontent. “But she _left_.”

“People do that,” Sunday says.

Mia cries herself out and quiets down, reaching up to rub her face with her hand. “She was the one person,” she says, her voice rent by tears. “She was the one person who thought I was special.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is,” she sniffles.

“Even if it was, you don’t stop being special just because you guys broke up,” Sunday murmurs, stroking her hair. “And you’re only twenty-three. There’ll be so many more people.”

Mia sniffles some more and reaches up to wipe her nose with a tissue, her rings flashing on her fingers in the dim light. “You’re so wise,” she says. “How did you get so wise?”

“From watching everybody else fuck everything up all the time.”

Mia hiccups, then starts laughing, and Sunday joins her.

“I wanna vandalize something,” Mia says. “I hate this stupid hotel and all these stupid people. I wanna go draw a dick on a wall.”

“It’s a casino, there’s security cameras everywhere.”

“Then I’ll carve a dick on this nightstand.”

“They’ll know it was us.”

Mia grins. “I’ll draw a dick inside the Bible. They’ll never check.”

“Fine,” Sunday relents, “you can draw a dick in the Bible.”

“And then I’ll replace it with a Quran.”

“No, see, you’re going too big again.” Sunday sits up. “I’m gonna go get you a ginger ale, okay? And don’t do anything bad while I’m gone.”

“I can’t make any promises.”

“Mia!”

“I’m kidding!”

*

Amir ends up even drunker than Evan. They quit gambling around one in the morning before changing into swim trunks and heading with Jason to the hotel’s infinity pool to hang out with a group of college students who are on vacation. Their new pool friends are thrilled that Amir and Evan are newlyweds, even finding them a bottle of champagne to pop.

One of the guys, Gavin, is clearly interested in Amir, which wouldn’t normally bother Evan, except after two glasses of champagne on top of everything else in his system, Amir is recklessly sloppy and harmlessly flirting the way he does when he’s wasted. Gavin keeps fussing over him and trying to make him laugh; it takes him offering to go get Amir a glass of water for Evan to get pissed enough to snap, “Hey, man, I have that covered, okay?” at which point he finally knocks it off.

Evan lures Amir away from that group by suggesting they go for pizza. They leave Jason behind and rent electric skateboards, then ride up and down the Strip looking for a pizza place, but they’re so drunk they can’t figure out how to find one that’s open, and then Evan crashes into a light post and eats shit on the sidewalk. He sits down hard on the curb, laughing and staring with a drunken lack of concern at his bloody palm.

Amir comes from behind him and tackles him forward, wrapping his arms around him. “Whajudo, idiot?” he slurs.

“I died,” Evan slurs back.

“You can’t die,” Amir says, giggling and kissing his neck. “We _just_ got married. Oh shit! Look!”

He stumbles away from Evan and dives back toward the sidewalk. Evan turns and sees Amir clasping his hands together like there’s something in them.

“What is that,” Evan says nervously.

“A frog!” Amir chirps.

“Dude, put it down.”

“Noo!” Amir’s face falls. “Issa lil frog… he needs me. He’s so little. And he’s all alone in Las Vegas.”

He stumbles back toward Evan and opens his hands a crack, showing Evan a tiny frog.

“Yeah but we can’t take care of it, babe,” Evan says.

“We can put ‘im in a bowl, and then take him back to Saccy, and I’ll set him free,” he slurs.

“You can’t take a frog in a bowl on an airplane, though. They wouldn’t let you through customs.”

“Oh,” Amir says, sounding devastated. “Shit…”

“I’m sorry,” Evan says, petting his arm.

“He needs my help, though.”

“He’ll be okay. He’s a Vegas frog, he knows what’s up. He belongs to the streets.”

“I guess,” Amir says, and very gently sets the frog back down on the sidewalk. “Bye-e. Be safe okay? Make good choices.”

Evan laughs and leans over to kiss him.

By the time they get back up to their room, Amir has forgotten about the pizza and the frog, and also how to walk.

“Where’re’re the girls,” he slurs from the bed he just collapsed onto.

Evan pulls his wet swim trunks off of him and tugs the comforter up over his slender penknife body. “Girls are back at the pool.”

“Noooo… _my_ girls…”

“Mia texted back hours ago, she said they were going to bed. Remember? You should go to bed too.”

“No,” Amir says petulantly. He rolls his head to the side and gazes up at Evan.

Evan doesn’t like seeing him this drunk, all gone in the eyes and not himself. He hates when Amir isn’t himself.

He goes into their giant bathroom and grabs a washcloth, wetting it in the sink and bringing it back out, then sits on the bed beside Amir and starts to wipe his smeared eye makeup off. He’s used to doing this for Amir after he plays gigs.

“Come to L.A. with me,” Amir says to him, squirming away. Evan strokes his dark hair and then gently wipes his cheeks.

“I can’t,” he says. “Gotta go to the Hamptons. Gotta tell my parents we got married.”

He tosses the used washcloth onto the bedside table and then peels his own trunks off, climbing in bed with floppy Amir, who nuzzles against him. They’re both a little cold from running around in wet swim trunks, and they shiver together, wrapped around each other’s warm bodies.

Amir clings to him, one hand gripping his shoulder from behind his back. “Please fight for us,” he slurs. “To them.”

“What?” Evan says, surprised. He presses his face into Amir’s hair and plays with it. “I always do.”

“No,” Amir says. “You never tell them how important I am.”

“Meer… I don’t have that kind of relationship with them, you know that…”

“Tell them. Okay? I tell my parents all the time. You ner — _never_ tell yours,” he hiccups.

“Okay, okay,” Evan agrees. He holds Amir tighter, rubbing his uninjured palm hard over the parts of Amir where gooseflesh has risen. His wedding band feels so obvious on his finger. He keeps running his thumb over it, as it to make sure it’s real.

LAS VEGAS, AUGUST 12, 2039

Amir wakes up Mia and Sunday at nine in the morning by coming into their room and loudly ululating at them.

“Oh my GOD,” Mia yells, once she’s gotten past the initial panic of being woken up like that and realizes what’s going on. “This is so unnecessary!”

“Is the hotel on fire?” Sunday says sleepily, pulling a pillow over her head.

“Good morning dicks,” Amir chirps hoarsely. “Let’s go get breakfast. C’mon. I’m married!”

“You’ll still be married in an hour,” Mia protests.

“I want coffee. You don’t want coffee?” Amir picks up a pillow off the end of the bed and throws it at Mia. “Iced coffee?”

“I’m gonna kill you.”

“Sunday?” he continues. “Iced coffee?”

She peeks out from under her pillow. “Yeah, iced coffee sounds good, actually.”

“Don’t reward this type of behavior,” Mia tells her.

“I didn’t know your voice went that high, Meer,” Sunday says.

“I have one more octave than I thought!” he says excitedly. “You didn’t hear it during karaoke?”

“No, we weren’t calculating your _octaves_ ,” Mia says.

“I have to go wake Evan up, so meet us on the roof in fifteen,” Amir says, heading back out the door.

“Thirty,” Mia yells after him.

He ululates more on his way out.

*

Everyone really is horrifically hungover. The five of them meet up at the rooftop bar, wearing sunglasses and wincing.

Luckily, it’s overcast, which means that they’re mostly alone up there and there’s no pounding sun to endure. Jason orders a giant Bloody Mary, takes two sips and staggers off to go vomit into a plant. They all politely pretend to ignore him, even as their own stomachs are churning at the sound.

“What did you guys end up doing the rest of the night?” Mia says to her brother, picking at a plate of huevos rancheros.

Amir clears his throat. Next to him, Evan has pushed his omelette aside and laid his head down on the table, not even pretending to function. “Played poker… drank more. Went to the pool. We rented skateboards… Evan fell off…”

Evan holds up his hand, which Mia notices is bandaged on the palm.

Mia has her own injury, a gash on her finger sustained when she got up to clean up the glasses she’d smashed, after Sunday fell asleep. Luckily the hotel has pretty good complimentary Band-Aids.

“We don’t even know what happened to Jason,” Evan adds. “We left him at the pool.”

“He’s covered in hickies, so there’s only a few things he could’ve been doing,” Mia says.

“Is he? Wild.” Evan looks impressed.

“What about you guys?” Amir says.

Sunday glances over at Mia, looking apprehensive. They hear an ambulance wailing distantly in the street below.

Mia shrugs. “I lost about nine grand at blackjack,” she says.

Amir’s mouth falls open. “You serious?”

“Yeah.”

There’s genuine concern on his face, and he stares at her for a moment, the breeze whipping his hair around. “Nine grand? In one night?”

Annoyance and shame flare in Mia’s chest. “It was a stupid fuck-up,” she says. “I shouldn’t have done the coke. It was dumb. It’s fine.”

Normally she’d be eager to confide in Amir, but today it feels like he and Evan are a united front across the table, and that rattles her. Her entire life, she’s been trying to hold her family together, trying to keep Amir reassured and connected and invested in the whole thing, and now he’s dipped out and made his own family. Well, fine. _Go,_ if you want to go so bad.

What’s really gnawing at her is a fear that Evan has taken her place as Amir’s confidant and partner in crime. She and Amir are more than siblings, they’re like war buddies. They went through their weird childhood together, and no one else had a story exactly like that. No one else could relate so acutely to the one smothering dad and one alcoholic dad, to the five step/half-siblings split between two homes. No one else could relate to their too-fast-too-much-too-everything brains, and their urge to sabotage things for themselves, and the vicious fights they know they can pick with each other because they would never in a million years stop speaking.

She’s never felt threatened by Evan before, but something curdled in her last night. It feels, lately, like everyone’s leaving her behind. The worst part is that she can’t even convince herself that’s not true, because it is. Everyone is quite literally leaving her behind.

Amir continues staring at her until she says sharply, “Why don’t you worry about how you’re going to tell the dads you got married?”

He scowls at her. “I’m working on it.”

“Yeah, good idea.”

Evan runs his hands through his sandy hair and groans softly. In the distance, they hear Jason dry heaving, nothing left in his stomach.

Mia looks out at the other people on the roof — the pathetic middle-aged guys scamming on their waitress at the other end of the lounge, the twenty-somethings that sit a few tables away, laughing to themselves. Other than that, the roof is deserted. The world feels lonely and abandoned, like a CVS on Christmas.

MCCARRAN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, AUGUST 12, 2039

Twelve hours after their wedding, Amir and Evan have to part ways — Evan wants to head off the news of his marriage before it reaches his dad through his network of spies.

“I’ll fly back out right away,” he promises Amir when they part at security. Amir is hungover and emotionally crumbly, clinging to Evan like he’s a stuffed animal.

Mia observes them from a few feet away, checking her watch so they don’t waste too much time.

“Can you get the WiFi and text me?” Amir says to him, his face buried in Evan’s chest. “So I know your plane didn’t crash?”

“Yeah, sure, but my plane’s not gonna crash.” Evan meets Mia’s eyes, then, and gives her a look like, _what’s the deal?_ She laughs and shrugs.

“Are you good with telling your parents?” Mia asks him. “You don’t want to wait ‘til Amir can come along, as backup?”

Evan grimaces. “Nah. I have to do this on my own. It’d be worse if he came, honestly. I know how to deal with them.”

As nervous as Mia is about their dinner with Louis and Zayn tonight, she’s more worried about Evan facing his own parents. They wave to him as they walk away, and Mia makes a quick dua that he’ll be alright.

They already left behind Sunday, who hugged Mia for a long time, which made a lump rise in her throat. Then Sunday handed Amir a little blue license plate keychain with VEGAS on it, explaining, “Something blue.”

After that, they didn’t want to see her go, but she said she needed to get back to the Sac and help Liam out with a Patrick problem that he had confided in her about. Sunday didn’t specify what it was, and Mia didn’t ask. She’s making herself step back and let Sunday step into her quasi-parental shoes.

She and Amir fly back to Los Angeles in coach, and to Mia’s relief, things seem as normal as ever. They exchange looks when the in-flight babies start making noises that mean they’re about to cry, and crack up when the old guy across the aisle farts in his sleep. Mia even gives him the window seat, as an olive branch.

“Why are you putting a neck pillow on?” Amir says to her as he struggles with his foldout tray. “You’re not sleeping. It’s an hour flight.”

“My neck hurts.”

He nods and falls quiet. Mia watches him in curiosity.

“What?” Amir mutters. “You keep staring at me, what is it?”

She exhales. “Just wondering why you didn’t tell me you were getting married.”

He lolls his head lazily against the headrest, looking annoyed. “‘Cos you would’ve talked me out of it.”

Mia’s surprised. “What, and you would’ve listened?”

“I don’t know. I mean, what I wanted to do was just do it, and not have people look at me like I’m crazy or stupid, which you’ve been doing since yesterday —“

“I’m _not_! I’m just worried —“

A woman sitting behind them pops up and whispers, “Hi, excuse me, could you two please keep it down?”

“Why don’t you put some headphones on?” Mia says to her, then immediately regrets it. “Sorry. We’ll try.”

The woman gives her a look, like, _chill out girly_ , before sinking back into her seat. Mia can’t really blame her.

The two of them sit in surly silence for a moment, then Amir tries to shove her elbow off their shared armrest, and she kicks him in the shin, and soon they’re laughing.

“Have you noticed we both have this obsession with people looking at us funny?” Mia says. “I feel like we could probably chill out about that.”

“Everyone’s been staring at us our whole lives, though,” Amir mutters.

“But Sunday gets that too, and she doesn’t obsess about it.”

“Well, she can fuck off,” Amir says, making Mia laugh more. “No, seriously. Where does she get off being so well-adjusted? I’m sick of it.”

“She’s not, she just takes stuff in stride better than we do.”

“Whatever it is, I hate it. I want her to be a melodramatic asshole too.”

Mia sighs. “I don’t mean to look at you like I think you’re crazy,” she whispers. “I don’t. I kind of get why you did it. I mean, if Aya’d said to me, like, ‘hey, I have to go abroad for my career, but if we get married before I leave, we don’t have to break up’, I’d…”

She breaks off. It’s too painful to indulge in wishful thinking.

“Right, so you get it,” Amir says. “I was like, solving a problem. I mean we’d just get married eventually anyway, right? Why not now?”

“Wow, that’s romantic.”

He huffs at her. “And we _wanted_ to, okay? All I know is that I feel better now that I did it.”

“Okay, I just worry that you did it to avoid breaking up when that might’ve been the smarter choice in the long run.”

Amir’s face drops completely; he looks crestfallen. “The fuck? Why would you say that?”

“The dads are going to say the same exact thing. I’m just preparing you.”

“Stop it,” he snaps. “Don’t be Mom. Be on my side.”

“Fucking —“ The guy in front of them side-eyes her, so Mia drops her voice again. “I _am_ on your side! I’m trying to protect you!”

“Why do you think you know better?” Amir says, his eyes flashing.

“‘Cos being in love blinds you to stuff!”

“I think maybe you’re just bitter ‘cos you couldn’t work things out with Aya, and you wish I was alone and miserable, too,” he snaps.

Anger rises in Mia so hot and quick she barely has time to think before she’s cracking him in the ribs with her elbow.

Amir swears quietly and grabs at his side. “Ow! The fuck, Mia!”

“Shh, you’re fine. Sorry. You’re fine.”

“No I’m not, that hurt!”

“Well, don’t say shit like that, then!”

A flight attendant walking by kneels next to them and whispers, “Guys, I’m having some complaints about the noise level in this row.”

Embarrassed, Mia ducks her gaze and mumbles an apology. The flight attendant moves on down the aisle.

“Listen,” she hisses at Amir. “I’m just trying to save you some pain down the road. But be a little dickhead if you want.”

“Stop assuming I’m gonna have pain down the road!” he hisses back. “Do you even get it, how that makes me feel? I just made this huge, life-changing decision, and the one person I want most of anybody to support me can’t stop acting like I just fucked up my life?”

“Really? I’m the one person, me?”

“Oh, my God.” Amir rolls his eyes hugely. “Yes!”

“Look, I’m sorry. I keep trying to just let it go and trust that you know what you’re doing.”

“Nobody knows what they’re doing.”

“I just don’t want you to, like, close yourself off from your potential in any way. You know that can happen! It happened to our parents!”

“Look, I’m not pregnant,” Amir whispers, so quiet she can barely hear him over the conversations around them, the roar of the plane, and a crying baby two rows back. “And when I was, I handled it the smart way. So don’t act like I’m set on making their same mistakes.”

Mia’s surprised to hear him say this. He never talks about his abortion.

“Bad decisions don’t just affect your kids,” she says. “They affect the people who make them, too.”

“You really think this was a _bad decision?_ Like, legitimately? Marrying someone I love, after being together for five years —“

“— on and off! —“

“— is the same as like, crashing a Ferrari, or gambling ten thousand dollars away?”

“Jesus, don’t put me losing some money in the same category as Jason almost killing you,” Mia says crossly. “I didn’t mean to say _bad_ decision, sorry, I keep saying shit without thinking. I just don’t want you getting hurt.”

“ _You’re_ hurting me,” he mutters.

“Well, I’m sorry. I’m not trying to hurt you. Listen, I know how much shit you’re gonna get from the dads, so, y’know…” Mia struggles for a moment, then says, “I’ll shut up about this now. I just wanted to say what I was going to say, and I feel like I said it all, so, fine. I’m on your side now, I’m in your corner.”

Amir gives her a suspicious look out of the corner of his eye. “Okay. Thanks, I guess.”

“What?”

He snorts. “Just kind of feel like you’re rooting for me to fail, here.”

“I’m not!” Mia cries.

The guy in front of them whips around again, almost sending his neck pillow flying. “Miss? Please!”

“Alright, we get it! Put headphones in!”

He rolls his eyes and turns grudgingly back around.

Amir aims a middle finger at the back of his head. “I’m never flying coach again.”

“I’m not rooting for you guys to fail,” Mia says. “Amir, can you please look at me? I’m not, I swear. And I’m done. I’m in your corner now. We’re a united front.”

Amir sighs heavily. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah, I guess. I mean, I’d really like you on my side, considering you’re Dad’s favorite.”

“I am not!”

“And I’m gonna need to be able to talk to you, y’know.”

“I know!”

“Not just for dealing with our parents,” Amir says. “I have to deal with Evan’s, too. They’re probably gonna try to have me killed for putting tantric Muslim voodoo on his dick.”

Mia laughs. “You know that shit is about Evan and not you, right? It’s not that they don’t like you, ‘cos they liked you when you guys were just friends. They probably wouldn’t like anyone he was with.”

Amir struggles with his tray some more, then finally gives up and says, “I already miss him.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I hadn’t seen him all summer, and we only got a couple days together.”

“You wanna watch a movie?” Mia offers. “Or, like, half a movie?”

Amir shrugs.

Mia turns her TV on. “Fine, be like that.”

“Wait, okay, but nothing stupid though,” he says. “Nothing about sports.”

She hands him his pair of headphones. “By the way,” she says, “I’m not Dad’s favorite. _Max_ is Dad’s favorite.”

Amir laughs. “Oh, shit, you’re right. He snuck up on us, didn’t he?”

“Saint Max. But how can you even resent him for it?”

“You can’t, he’s too nice. That fucker.”

SACRAMENTO, AUGUST 12, 2039

By the time Sunday’s taxi is pulling up to the house, the twins’ school bus is, too. She gets out at the gate so she can walk up the driveway with Max, who waves goodbye to his friends as they shout boyishly out the bus window and then turns to her with a big smile.

“Hi hi,” he says.

“Hey hey. How was school?”

“Good! How was Vegas?”

“Uhh… weird.” Sunday swipes her watch against the reader on the stone column to let them in. While they’re waiting for the iron-wrought gates to swing open, she says, “So, Paddy’s suspended, huh?”

“Yeah,” Max says, shrugging his backpack higher on his shoulder and immediately loosening his tie. “Two weeks.”

They walk through the gate and start off up the hill, hemmed in on either side by a dense thicket of trees.

“How much trouble is he in?” she says, glancing over at him. He’s about as tall as she is, now; he shot up four inches in the last six months, and since Sunday’s been home, he’s been eating all of the food in the house and taking all of the Tylenol for his growing pains. Between Sunday, Louis, Liam, Max and Mia, they run out of Tylenol like once a month.

Max shrugs amiably. “I’m not sure,” he says. “Since we’re down a dad, right now. He doesn’t have a set punishment yet, or anything.”

“Dad hasn’t told Louis?”

“Nah, he’s waiting for him to get home, he didn’t want to mess up the end of his tour for him.” Max shoots her a glance. “You look stressed out. What’s up?”

“Oh,” Sunday sighs. They crest the hill, and she looks up at their little house on the horizon, perched on its own hill. “You guys don’t usually walk this far from the bus, do you?”

“Nah, we take our scooters back and forth,” Max says. “But I’m feeling like you want to talk?”

Sunday nods, glancing back down at her feet. “I’ll tell you, but you can’t tell Dad yet. Not ‘til Louis finds out.”

“Okay,” Max agrees. “How bad is it?”

“It’s not _bad_ , it’s just, um…” She glances up at him, squinting in the midday sun. His startling mismatched eyes squint back at her. “Amir got married to Evan last night. It’s why we went to Vegas.”

Max gasps theatrically and claps his hands to his mouth. “Oh shit! No way!”

Sunday laughs. “Yeah.”

“I mean, that’s good, right? That’s good news? They’ve been together forever.”

Sunday wants to say no, only since the end of high school, but she realizes with a jolt that that was almost five years ago, now. Max was only nine, of course he thinks it’s been forever. To her, it feels a lot more recent.

“I dunno if Louis and Zayn are gonna feel that way,” she says. “Amir’s only twenty-two.”

“Ooooh,” Max says. “Yeah.” He kicks at a rock that’s in his way, then picks it up apologetically after it skitters a few feet and tosses it gently into the forest. “I guess that’s not that old.”

Sunday elbows him. “You think we’re old?”

“Kinda! Not _old_ old. But old enough to get married, maybe?”

“It’s not so common anymore, to do it that young,” Sunday says.

“So why’d they do it, then?”

“I think only they really know the answer to that.”

“But did they say why they did?”

“Yeah. Kind of. It’s, like, complicated adult relationship stuff.”

“Try me.”

“Just... when you’re our age, you have all these things to consider, like geography and stuff. You might have to make sacrifices on where you live or what job you take, because of the person you’re with. So if you get married, it’s like making a promise to deal with that stuff and make things work.”

Max nods. “I get it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. It might sound weird, but I kind of feel that way, being twins.”

Sunday considers this. When they’re not talking, she can hear cicadas buzzing in the woods. “No, I could see that, actually.”

“We’ve just always done everything together, and I always kind of thought we’d keep doing that,” Max says. “But I dunno. Lately, when we talk about college and stuff… I personally feel different about it than I used to. I always kinda just assumed I’d go, and, like, that me and Paddy would go together.”

“You think you might not go to college?””

“Dad Dad asked me that,” he says. When they’re talking to Sunday, the twins always call Louis Dad and Liam ‘Dad Dad’, like they’re giving him an extra title for his biological role. “I told him, honestly, I don’t know. I just dunno what I’d study. Patrick isn’t sure if he wants to go, either, but at least he knows he’d want to study business.”

“You should do something with sports,” she says. “You love playing sports.”

”Did I tell you Dad actually wants me to start playing for club teams instead of school teams?” Max says, tugging a leaf off a tree as he goes by. “He says he doesn’t want me to get too deep into sports, like playing varsity, ‘cos I’d lose my love for the game, or whatever. He says that’s what happened to Mia with soccer.”

“You think he’s right?”

“Maybe. I mean, it’d be cool to play varsity, but I really don’t care about winning that much. I don’t get why everyone gets so wound up about it, either. It’s not like it even matters.”

“You don’t think winning matters? You’re so competitive with Patrick, both of you are so competitive when we all play games and stuff.”

Max tears the leaf into pieces as he walks. “But that’s just like, for fun. You know? We’re just playing around. I hate when we beat a team at an away game or whatever, and the kids are like, crying and shit. That sucks. I don’t get where the fun in that is.”

“I think you’d be a good coach,” Sunday says. “You liked coaching the younger kids at baseball camp, right? I could see you doing that for a living.”

“But what do you study to be a coach?”

“Sports psychology, maybe.”

Max shrugs. “That sounds hard,” he says.

“Listen, I mean, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do at your age, either. And I still haven’t done anything,” she adds with a laugh. “Not anything normal, anyway. Just horses. I’ve never had a regular day job, never went to college. So don’t worry too much.”

“I’m not,” Max assures her. “I’ll figure it out. It’s just really weird to think me and Patrick might, like, go different ways after high school.”

“Would you guys be okay with that?”

Max rubs at the back of his neck and shrugs. “Maybe,” he says. “I could deal with it better than Patrick, I think. If I went to a different school he’d probably like, sneak over and try to live in my dorm with me. I’m serious!” he says, when she starts laughing.

“No, I’m laughing ‘cos it’s true,” Sunday says.

“He’d never admit it, though.”

Patrick isn’t very open about his feelings — it’s probably his rebellion against growing up in such a touchy-feely household, with sensitive musician dads — but they all know he loves them as much as they love him, and no one moreso than Max. When Max had to get his appendix out at age seven, Patrick cried the entire time he was in surgery, tears silently streaming down his scowling face while Louis petted his hair. When Max came back, he climbed in his bed and stayed there with him overnight. Louis and Liam slept in armchairs in the corner, and Patrick slept with his little back jammed uncomfortably against the hospital bed rail, one arm thrown across Max’s chest like he was trying to prevent him from going anywhere.

“It’s sweet you guys have that,” Sunday says. “I’ve always been kind of jealous.”

“Yeah?”

“Just, y’know, everyone’s in pairs but me. Mia and Amir, you and Paddy.”

“I think you’re kinda lucky,” Max says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. There’s less pressure,” he says. “I feel like I always have to get along with him, I feel like people lump us together.”

“Like how?”

“Like — everyone thinks I knew he was selling essays, and I kind of suspected, but it’s not like he actually told me about it. Stuff like that. And it took ‘til high school for people to realize they don’t have to like both of us to be friends with one of us, or they don’t have to invite us together every time.”

“I guess that could be annoying.”

“It’s just a lot of pressure to always get along. You want to, like, be what other people think you are, y’know? People are always talking about how we must have this crazy twin bond, and like, we do, but nobody can be cool with somebody else _all_ the time. You’re gonna get mad or sick of them once in a while.”

“Even you?” Sunday teases him.

Max laughs. “Even me.”

Sunday thinks of what Mia was saying about Amir during her tearful breakdown. They walk in silence for a while, with only the sound of the birds in the trees and their shoes scuffing the road.

“Are you mad at him right now?” she says.

“A little,” he admits.

“Yeah?”

“It’s just so dumb, what he did. And he did it ‘cos he wanted people to think he was cool. I wish he didn’t care about that.”

“I was just talking to Amir about that,” Sunday says. “He thinks being cool ended up being pointless.”

“It is! And I don't like Paddy’s friends,” Max says. “Like Rodman, and Nathan, they’re not funny. They do the dumbest stuff just to get people to like them. And they’re kind of dicks, sometimes.”

“They’re probably just insecure.”

“It’s _dumb_ ,” Max says passionately. “If you want people to like you, just be friendly.”

Sunday doesn’t know how to explain to Max that most people aren’t built the way he is. “I think Patrick’s a little less secure than you,” she says.

“What’s that mean, though?”

“What?”

“Secure, insecure, I don’t really know what you mean by that.”

“I mean he isn’t as sure of who he is as you are. Not everyone is like you.”

“In what way?” Max says, sounding genuinely confused.

“Like, how you’re at ease with people,” Sunday says. “And at ease with yourself. I mean, you know that, right? Why do you think you keep getting picked as class president? It’s not like you’re an academic leader. Your grades are as shitty as mine were.”

Max laughs delightedly at this. “They’re not that bad!”

“Max. You are like, barely scraping a B minus average.”

“Actually at Elk Grove they don’t do averages,” Max says, all serious. “‘Cos they say that makes people think of themselves as a number. I do have a D in English though.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I’m staying after school for help and stuff. I’m just having a hard time with the play we’re reading. I was saying to Patrick this morning that I should have bought some of his essays.”

Sunday laughs.

“He said he would’ve given me the friends and family discount,” Max says, grinning. “Ten percent off.”

“He’s the worst.”

“I know.”

“Anyway, what I meant was, you’re cool without trying to be, but not everyone can pull that off.”

“But Patrick could! He doesn’t have to try so hard.”

“Do you ever tell him that?”

“No.”

“Maybe you should.”

“He wouldn’t listen,” Max says moodily, then pulls another leaf off of a tree as they go by.

“He’ll change,” Sunday says. “People grow up.”

They’re quiet for a moment, then Max nudges her. “Hey… you wanna race?”

“Sure,” she says, and just like that, they both break into a sprint, all troubling thoughts forgotten.

*

Patrick is holed away in his room when they get back, in bed and looking at his phone. Goose is lying beside him, happily curled up in the navy blue comforter; his tail thumps against it when he spots them in the doorway.

Max barges into Patrick’s room and turns his Playstation on, tossing one controller at Patrick and taking the other for himself as he collapses into a beanbag.

“Hi Paddy,” Sunday says.

He waves at her.

“How you doing?”

“We’re not playing 2K, I want us to finish Darkcraft before Eddie spoils us for the ending,” Patrick says to Max, who sighs in response but doesn’t argue. “I’m fine. How was Vegas?”

“It was exactly like I expected,” she says.

“Is gambling fun?”

“No,” Sunday says sharply. “It’s not.”

“Hmm,” Patrick says with a mischievous smile, his eyes locked on the TV as his thumbs move on the controller buttons lightning-fast. “Feel like you’re lying.”

“Well, you’re not gonna find out ‘til you’re twenty-one, either way.”

“We’ll see. I have my ways.”

“Paddy,” Sunday says in exasperation.

“Wait,” Max says, looking away from the screen and over at Patrick. “I’m —“

“I know you’re playing a campaign,” Patrick replies, before he even actually says anything. “I already logged in as you.”

Max nods. “Fuego.”

“You think I’d be good at gambling?” Patrick asks him.

“Uh, you just fucked up your business and almost got expelled because you took too big a risk on it,” Max says. He’s much more crass when he’s around Patrick. “So, no, I don’t think you’d be good at gambling.”

“Gotta spend money to make money,” Patrick counters.

Sunday wants to tell them about Mia’s screw-up as a cautionary tale, but she doesn’t want to snitch on her. She thumps her fist on the door jamb and says, “Where’s Dad?”

Patrick gets a guilty look. “Drinking in the greenhouse.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh. I think I stressed him out.”

“I’m sure you did,” Sunday says. “Guys, uh… make sure you get your homework done, okay?”

They both look at her like she has two heads.

“What is that?” Patrick says, bursting out laughing. “Is that your Mia impression?”

She can’t help but laugh too. One of the most frustrating things about Patrick is how he can make you laugh when you’re trying to be stern with him, though he never means it in a malicious way. “No, just, y’know — she’s not here, and Louis isn’t here, and you’re giving Dad a hard time, so, y’know, just get your stupid homework done.”

“Affirmative,” Patrick says, and they both salute her.

“We will,” Max adds, which is much more comforting to hear.

Sunday nods and starts to leave.

“Wait! Sunday!” they chorus. “Shut the door shut the door shutthedooooor.”

“Why?” she teases, her hand lingering on the knob.

“Sundaaaaaaay,” Patrick complains. “Come on.”

“What are you gonna do in here if I do?” Sunday says, smiling. “You gonna smoke weed?”

“Sundaaaay,” Max pleads. “Idon’tsmokeweedyouknowIdon’tsmokeweeeeed!” (Patrick is suspiciously silent.)

“Say please,” Sunday says.

“Please,” they say in unison.

“Fine,” Sunday says, pulling the door shut.

*

Liam is indeed drunk in the greenhouse. He’s lying in a hammock, staring up at the vines that crisscross the ceiling and cast the whole greenhouse in an eerie light. A six pack sits next to him on the stone floor, with all but two beers missing. One is in his hand.

“Dad?” Sunday says, walking over to him through rows of ginseng, bell peppers and tomatoes.

“Hi sweetie,” he says, sitting up a little. “You just get in?”

“Yeah.” She grabs a wooden stool and drags it over to him, sitting beside him, then grabs one of the remaining beers for herself, mostly to prevent him from drinking it.

“How was your flight?”

“It was fine. You okay?”

Liam nods. He looks like he hasn’t shaved yet today, and his eyes are bloodshot and bleary. “Just chilling.”

Sunday laughs. “Okay. Can I chill with you?”

“Of course, love.”

She clinks bottles with him, and he smiles at her.

“It’s been nice having you girls around,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Nice break from the teenage boys.”

“I’m sure.”

Liam sips his beer. “I thought you’d be a boy,” he says, sounding tipsy. “I was so sure of it, when your mum was pregnant, I was buyin’ boy clothes and things. It’s funny, ‘cos when Louis first told me he was pregnant with Mims, I thought she’d be a boy too. I couldn’t imagine either of us having little girls. But I’m glad you were, honestly.”

“Were you?”

“Yes!” He drains the bottle, then sets it down on the floor with a clink. “Boys scare me.”

“You afraid of Patrick?” Sunday says, twisting her beer’s cap off and taking a sip. It’s lukewarm, but oh well.

“Aren’t we all?” Liam jokes. “No, he’s a great kid. I just think… I dunno. Max is easy, but Paddy’s a bit like Louis’ other kids. Always questioning everything, always testing us.” He hiccups softly. “Defiant.”

“You blame Louis?”

“No! No.” Liam laughs and rubs his hand over his face. “Maybe his genes? Oh, I dunno. Maybe I do. He was like that when he was younger, Lou. Always the loveliest guy, of course, but just — bit of a hellion. He never quite knew what to do with himself.”

“Patrick respects you a lot,” Sunday says. “Probably more than he does anybody. I think he’s just figuring out who he is.”

“He knows who he is,” Liam says, hiccuping again and lolling his head in the hammock. “He’s already decided. He’s like you that way. Already made up his mind.”

“I haven’t made up my mind,” Sunday admits. “I don’t feel like I know anything about anything.”

This summer has felt like one long waking dream to her. During the day, she’s here with her family in the land that time forgot, surrounded by old-growth forest and working with her horse in peaceful solitude. At night, she runs away to be with Julio at Lionel’s farm, and they gallop through moonlit misty fields, then talk for hours while they cool out their borrowed horses.

Everything has felt less real since their house in Los Angeles burned down. It’s like an earthquake that’s still giving off aftershocks, years later. She knows it had an impact on her, one she’s still struggling with — suddenly she has a problem with claustrophobia that she’d never had before, a nervous reaction to tight, crowded spaces, like dressage rings at competitions, and barns, and the dressing room in her horse trailer. Even the ring she rides in here at home sometimes feels like it’s choking her. She’s glad they moved to the country, because it means she can put her new prospect Ulysses in the trailer and take him out to vast expanses of open space, with only the mountains on the horizon to hold her in.

“Welcome to the club,” Liam says to her. “I’m forty-six and I still feel that way.”

“You’re forty-five.”

“Nearly forty-six. Two weeks.”

“What do you want for your birthday?”

He smiles wanly. “My husband home.”

“You’ll get that one early,” Sunday tells him.

“I know.”

“Want us to throw you a party?”

Liam holds his hand up, with his thumb and finger close together. “A little one.”

“How big is little?” Sunday says, sipping her beer. “How many people?”

“Thirty-ish.”

“That’s little?”

“We have a lot of pals, me and your dad,” Liam says, then hiccups again. “Sorry. Me and Louis. I’m your dad.”

Sunday hesitates awkwardly, then says, “You can call him that. He did adopt me.”

“Right,” Liam says. “No, I dunno why I… you’re right. He’s your dad too.”

She peels the label off her beer a little bit. “You’re my _dad_ dad,” she says. “You’re the one who yells at me to put oil in my car.”

He laughs hard. “You never put oil in that damn car! No, I know, sweetheart. I love that you two love each other.” Liam falls quiet, hugging his arms to himself in the hammock. “I knew he’d be good to you. Y’know, I was afraid to bring anyone around, after your mum left...”

“Yeah, I don’t remember meeting anyone you were dating.”

“They were just flings,” Liam admits. “But they always ended up wanting to meet you, ‘cos, y’know. Single dad, right? You were my whole world. Not that you aren’t still, but it was a bit more drastic back then.”

Sunday smiles at him.

“And I always told ‘em, y’know, she’s not ready. I even kept Louis away a bit, at first. I think I told you we were mates, which was true. But with him, I was just afraid you’d get attached and then we’d split up. I wasn’t worried about him being a loving stepdad, even if, y’know, a sort of chaotic one. That’s honestly a tiny part of why I wanted to be with him, was for your sake.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Sunday says, her heart hurting with painful tenderness, in the way that only Liam can make her heart hurt.

“‘Course. And me and him raised you alright in the end, yeah? Didn’t fuck you up too bad?”

“Yeah,” Sunday says. “I guess. I’ve been realizing, lately… I’m kind of taking a weird path in life.”

“That’s alright,” Liam says softly. His eyes are closed, and he sounds like he might drift off. “You’re old enough to decide for yourself... I just want you to be happy.”

“I think I’m happy,” Sunday says.

“Do you feel alright about taking a break from competing? I thought it might make you feel a little lost, since you’ve been focusing on that for so long. You seem a little dreamy lately… not quite your usual self.”

Sunday picks at her nails, thinking about it, then nods. “I think it was the right thing to do. I’m just thinking about stuff a lot. I’m taking some time to consider my next moves, and what I’ll do when that part of my life is over.”

“Yeah?” Liam sounds pleased about this.

“Yeah,” Sunday says. “I mean, it’s not something you can do forever. I’ve been talking to older riders a lot, and they keep telling me that… you need a plan B.”

“It’s like music.”

“Not like music!” She laughs. “You still make music. My body’s gonna be destroyed by thirty-five, I literally won’t be able to ride like I do now.”

“Nawww,” Liam scoffs. “No way anyone could keep you off a horse. You’ll be up there when you’re ninety.”

“We’ll see.”

Liam shifts in the hammock so he’s on his side, curled up. “You mind if I rest my eyes a minute, sweets?”

“You mean take a nap?”

“No! Just a rest.”

She gets to her feet, draining the rest of her beer. “Sure,” she says. “Anything I can do in here?”

“Pick some tomatoes for me?” Liam murmurs. “I wanna make a big salad tonight. Last night to do one before Louis comes home and starts banging on about the evils of salad.”

“Sure.”

MALIBU, AUGUST 12, 2039

Zayn would skip dinner, if he were allowed. He’s got laryngitis (now a chronic problem in his forties, thanks to years of smoking), and he’s absolutely exhausted from all these meetings with HBO about the show he’s producing for them. Apparently television producers are also involved in the marketing of said shows. It would have been nice if someone warned him about this.

He even texted Louis, _how important is it for me to be there tonight?_ but Louis texted back, all caps, _YOU’RE NOT CANCELLING ON US,_ which, fine. It’s true he hasn’t seen Amir since his graduation from Julliard, but it’s not like he doesn’t talk to him at least once a week. And it’s not his fault his son ran away to London to become a knighted lord of jazz piano.

He has a regular booth at Nobu Malibu now, tucked away in the corner of the balcony and available for him to reserve whenever, at a moment’s notice. Zayn knows this is because the restaurant always hopes Harry’s going to be joining him, but he gets a little glee out of disappointing them each time. If he’s going to be the less famous spouse, he might as well make it fun for himself.

“Party of four tonight?” the hostess says as she leads him upstairs and out the patio door. It’s a typical Friday here, extremely busy. Zayn feels a few eyes flick over him as he walks past tables, but nothing more egregious than that.

“Yeah,” Zayn says cheerfully, or as cheerfully as he can when his voice sounds like tires crunching over a bag of gravel. “My ex and our kids.”

Her shoulders drop a little in disappointment.

Zayn settles on the side of the booth with his back facing the rest of the balcony, giving him complete privacy with a great view of the ocean. He texts the other three _i’m here late-os!!!!!_

 _We’re almost there sorry,_ Mia texts back. _also, you had a ten minute drive! we hit insane traffic in calabasas_

Louis mentioned he was dragging the kids to Calabasas after he got them from the airport; he wanted to check in on some British pub up there that he’s a shareholder in.

 _aha is this a surprise though?_ he says back in amusement. _are you all country people now?_

 _yes_ , Mia says. _i like my country roads. they let me open the audi up to 110_

 _don’t say that_ , Zayn says. _you better not be doing that shit_

She sends a winky face back.

Zayn, truth be told, enjoys his alone time, so he doesn’t mind waiting. He listens to the waves crash below, and watches the sunset. The candles on the table flicker as a gentle breeze rolls through, pushing out the warmth that had started to linger and sending it back to sea.

The sun is almost down, and Zayn has choked down two glasses of beta-carotene and B6 infused kombucha (Harry is convinced B6 is the cure for laryngitis) by the time the rest of his party joins him. He gets up to hug the kids first, who greet him with sweet chirps of “Hi Dad,” then he gives a quick hug to Louis and pulls back to look at him.

“You look rough, mate,” he says. Louis is peaked with a patchy little baby beard, and his eyes are bloodshot, rimmed by dark circles. “I mean — no offense, like you haven’t slept in a week.”

Louis sighs and says, in a voice as scratchy as Zayn’s own, “Just worn down. And I’ve got laryngitis, apparently.”

“Ay! Me too,” Zayn says, putting his hand up for a high-five. Louis laughs and high-fives him back.

“Budge in there,” he says, nudging Zayn toward the far end of their side of the booth. “I’ve had like ten coffees today, I’m gonna be getting up to wee.”

Zayn sighs and complies. “I don’t even understand how you hit traffic,” he says. “Traffic’s not heading south this time of day.”

“Yeah it is, headin’ southeast toward the city! Malibu’s southeast.”

“You take the 101 or back roads?”

“Back roads.”

“So that’s not southeast, mate! That’s a straight shot south!”

Louis shakes his head mulishly. “I can tell when the fuckin’ sun is setting to the back of me. Southeast.”

“Yeah, on the 36, you’re due east, but after that —“ Zayn flaps his hand at him. “Fuck it, you don’t even live here anymore, keep your southeast.”

“Souf, soufeast,” Mia says to Amir, and he laughs.

Zayn glances over at the kids. They’ve already squeezed in on their end, and they sit with clasped hands and watchful expressions. They both look tired, too.

“Where were you two flying in from, again?” he says.

“Vegas,” Louis supplies, looking down at the menu for a second before digging his reading glasses out of his breast pocket. “And apparently they got up to some nonsense while they were there, but they wouldn’t tell me what exactly.”

Zayn glances back at his kids, who look queasy and guilty. Anxiety flares in his gut. “Nonsense? What, bad tattoos?”

“No,” Mia says softly.

“Let’s order first,” Louis interrupts. “I want some food and a few beers in me before you ruin me evening.”

“We’re not going to ruin your evening,” Amir says, looking petulant.

“Don’t worry about it,” Louis says. “It’s been a whole summer without drama, I knew there had to be somethin’ on the horizon.”

“Dad can’t wait to get back to the Sac anyway,” Mia puts in. “He doesn’t care if we ruin his evening.”

“I just miss my family!” Louis exclaims.

“You also hate L.A.”

“I haaaaate L.A.,” Amir sings in a pitch perfect Randy Newman impression, making them all laugh.

“Why not leave tonight?” Zayn says.

“Got a charity dinner here tomorrow,” Louis says, glancing over at him. “Zayn, we talked about this. ‘Cos I asked if you could go to Amir’s performance for me? At the Troubadour?”

“Oh, yeah!” Zayn looks over at Amir, who looks stricken with stage fright at the mere mention. “I’ll be there,” he assures him.

“I wish I could be,” Louis laments.

“You guys sound so bad,” Amir says. “How do you both have laryngitis?”

Zayn shrugs. “Talking? I dunno.”

“For me, it’s definitely from tourin’,” Louis says. “Caught up with me right at the end. Not as young as I used to be, obviously.”

Mia takes her sunglasses off and sets them down on the wood of the table, shaking her hair back. “Yeah, Dad, tell us about tour.”

“Nothing much to tell, honestly. Each of you went to at least one date, so, you sort of got the gist.”

“Yeah, but did you have a good time?” Mia prods him.

“I think I’m gonna get the steak,” Louis says, setting his menu down. “Yeah, ‘course I did! It was wonderful. I ended up really happy with the album, and the fans were lovely… can’t ask for more than that, yeah? Whole thing just sort of flew by.”

“You want to get steak at a sushi restaurant?” Zayn asks him.

“Quit bovverin’ me.”

“How’ve you been?” Mia says to Zayn.

“You know how I am, you’ve just seen me last month.”

“For the sake of the rest of the table.”

Zayn shrugs. “Been alright. Staying busy. Put out an album, y’know. Been working on my show for HBO…”

“Yeah, I’ve been hearing things about that show, seein’ promos,” Louis says. “We don’t love it.”

“Who’s we?”

“The rest of the band.”

Zayn squints at him. “You don’t, huh? ‘Cos I haven’t heard anything from my husband.”

“That’s between you and him if he’s said anythin’ to you, but I can tell you, yeah, he’s got his issues with it.”

“Yeah, I’m personally not planning on watching it,” Mia says.

“That’s fine,” Zayn says. “Totally get that.”

The show Zayn’s a producer on, _The Other Ones,_ is a fictional pastiche about life in a boy band. And since it’s HBO, and Zayn is putting his brutally honest input in, there’s a lot of drugs, inter-band sex, and screaming matches. He gets why Louis would be annoyed, but the writing of the show rings true to him. Plus, it’s not necessarily _about_ One Direction. There are other boy bands.

Not wanting to twist the knife, but wanting to give them all a heads-up, Zayn adds, “Speaking of… I’m working on my memoirs again, as well. I’ve got an actual book deal now, so those ought to be coming out sometime in the next year or two. Probably’ll focus on my twenties quite a bit, so, fair warning.”

The kids exchange a look of trepidation.

“Oh, boy, I can’t wait,” Louis says sarcastically.

“As usual, everything I do’s evil in your father’s eyes,” Zayn says to Mia and Amir.

“Not hardly, Zayn! Just I wish you’d quit dragging me into your art when I don’t want to be there.”

“Anyway,” Zayn says, ignoring him. “What are the rest of you getting?”

“I’m not that hungry,” Amir says quietly.

“Alright, what’s up with you?” Zayn asks him.

Amir shrugs.

“Amir, why don’t you get something small you can pick at,” Louis says. “So we can order and then move on to whatever bad news it is you two have?”

“I’m ready to order,” Mia says, reaching up to tie her hair back into a ponytail.

Amir dry heaves like he always does when he’s anxious, then presses a fist to his mouth.

“Amir, what’s wrong?” Zayn says, genuinely worried now, to the point that he’s annoyed at being strung along like this.

“Evan and I got married in Vegas last night,” he blurts out, his voice high, and then drops his face into his arms on the table.

Silence descends like a wool blanket tossed over them. Suddenly the ocean breeze is unpleasantly brisk, the restaurant’s music entirely too loud, the chatter coming from the people at other tables grating. Zayn feels a chill roll up his spine that makes his head feel floaty. He looks in terror over at Louis, whose face has dropped and lost all color.

“You what?” Zayn says, leaning in closer to his son.

Amir protectively cradles his hands to the back of his head. “IgotmarriedinVegaslastnight.”

“Are you pregnant?” Louis says, sounding panicky.

“No!”

“Then, what, is Evan bein’ deported?” Zayn snaps.

“Back to where?” Mia says, laughing. “The Mayflower?”

“Amir, are you fuckin’ serious? _Why_?” Louis says, tossing his glasses down on the table. “Why would you — fine, get married, but why elope? We would’ve thrown you a nice wedding!”

Amir lifts his head. He looks agonized. “We can still do that.”

“Do what, have some sort of staged second wedding?”

“No, have a reception!”

The chill spreads. Zayn feels like he’s inside a bad dream, with his dislike of Evan deepening every second. Little shit, rich little blonde thief. Son stealer.

“I eloped ‘cos I thought you’d try to talk me out of it,” Amir snaps. “And I was right. You would have. Look how you’re reacting!”

“‘Cos this is completely out of the blue and irrational!” Zayn exclaims, causing a few people at a nearby table to turn. He shoots them a look that makes them sheepishly look away and start talking amongst themselves about the weather.

Louis puts a hand on his shoulder. “Alright, let’s… let’s try to be calm, here.”

“You knew about this?” Zayn demands of Mia, who puts her hands up. “You were with him? You let this happen?”

“He’s a grown adult, Dad,” she says calmly.

“No, he fucking isn’t, he’s twenty-two, that’s a child, he doesn’t know anything.” Zayn is wild with anxiety; the balcony suddenly feels like a cage he’s in.

“Thanks,” Amir says, his voice sour.

Mia laughs bitterly. “Glad you had me at twenty-two, if that’s how you feel.”

“And you guys eloped, too!” Amir adds.

“We eloped ‘cos I was three months pregnant with you!” Louis sighs and rubs his hand over his face, still gripping Zayn with the other. “You know, I’d appreciate not having our every decision and mistake thrown back in our faces for the rest of our lives. We did our best. We don’t want you to struggle the way we did. We want better for you. Why is that so hard to understand?”

“I’m not struggling,” Amir says. Zayn recognizes himself on his son’s face; the defiant eyes and tight jaw, the fervent conviction that everyone will understand if he can just explain, explain, explain himself out from under. It’s upsetting to see. “You don’t even want to hear why we did this?”

“I assume it’s ‘cos you’ve both finished your degrees and want to firm your relationship up now that you’re going to be doing completely different things, potentially on different continents?” Louis says.

Amir opens his mouth, then closes it.

“That pretty much nails it,” Mia says.

“Shut up,” Amir mutters. “Let me handle this.”

“I thought you wanted backup!”

“Not if you’re gonna undermine me!”

“Amir,” Louis interrupts gently. “Your dad and I are just concerned, alright? That’s all. This is a massive life decision… I know people in our, um, income bracket, and general situation in life, have got a bit of a relaxed attitude about marriage being serious, but to us it’s a big deal. Also since you did it by… er… running off and just getting it done, and not consulting our lawyers, with no prenup.”

“I know,” Amir says. He’s growing paler; Zayn pours a glass of water from the pitcher on the table, and pushes it over to him insistently. He takes a sip. “That’s a bigger problem for Evan, though, I think?”

“Where is Evan, anyway?” Louis says.

“The Hamptons,” Amir says. “He’s going to tell his family. He hasn’t yet, though, ‘cos um, right after he landed, his aunt’s dogs got loose, and they were all looking for them all day — he wants the timing to be right —”

“Fuck Evan,” Zayn says, and ignores a soft admonition from Louis. “I’m worried about _you_. I want to make sure _you’re_ protected, like. I mean, what the fuck? Whose idea was this?”

“Mine,” Amir says quietly. “I proposed to him in London the other day.”

Mia has her hands laced together and pressed to her mouth as she watches Amir, her blue eyes large.

“Why?” Zayn demands.

“I didn’t want to lose him,” Amir says. The familiarity of this makes Zayn nauseous. “It’s like Dad said, I didn’t want us to break up over stupid career shit.”

Louis blows out an “oh” as a soft sigh.

“I knew you’d be pissed,” he says. “You especially,” he adds, with a nod to Zayn. “But it already happened. I’m not asking for permission, and I’m not apologizing.”

Silence falls over the table again. It’s now fully night, their faces lit only by the candles on their table and the fairy lights strung over the balcony railing.

“We’re hurt,” Louis says. “I hope you understand that. You completely left us out of this event that’s, like, y’know, traditionally a family thing. We’re a close family, aren’t we?”

“I brought Mia and Sunday,” Amir says.

Zayn twitches reflexively at the idea that Liam’s daughter was invited to his son’s wedding, but he wasn’t.

“And I appreciate that, I think it’s very sweet,” Louis says. He’s clearly choosing his words carefully. “But, um. Y’know. Your dad and I are hurt. That’s just... what we are. And worried, as well.”

Amir picks up a manila folder that was lying on the booth between him and Mia and hands it to them. Louis takes it and lets it fall open on the table between them. Zayn glances at it.

It’s wedding photos, printed large on thick stock. Despite his anger and anxiety, Zayn feels a little pang of parental pride, looking at them. Amir’s outfit is brilliant, and he looks purely happy. Really joyful, especially in the photos of him and Evan exchanging their rings.

Zayn thinks he probably looked that youthfully happy when he married Louis at the courthouse, and that wears him down a little further.

“These are lovely,” Louis says, his voice small. “I’d like to make a few copies, if I can… send them to family.”

“Me too,” Zayn says.

At this, Amir looks like he’s about to cry. “I didn’t mean to hurt you guys,” he says. “I just wanted you to take this seriously. I didn’t think you would until after it happened.”

Hot tears prickle at Zayn’s eyes. He stares down at the photos, desperately working to blink them back.

“I’m just chuffed to finally have some photos where you’re smiling,” Louis says hoarsely, grinning.

Amir chokes out a laugh. “Stop!”

“You have a lovely smile! I like to see it.”

“He’s mini Dad,” Mia says.

“He is,” Louis agrees.

Zayn, pained, clears his throat.

Louis shuffles the photos back together. “Just, couldn’t you get a lip tattoo or something instead, love?” he says to Amir. “If you wanted to do something impulsive?”

Amir shrugs.

“I’ve been doing dumb shit too,” Mia announces.

Zayn fixes her with a look. “Like what?”

“At my last game, I got in a fistfight with a girl on the other team, and I’m suspended for our next game. And when we were in Vegas, I lost nine grand at blackjack.”

“Yeah, alright. You’re not funny, Yasmeen.”

“I’m not joking!”

“Yeah you are,” Zayn says. “You’re just fuckin’ with us to take the heat off your brother.”

“Dad?” Mia says, with a sort of manic smile. “I’m not kidding, okay? Check my discretionary fund. I emptied it. It’s gone.”

“Mia,” Louis says, sounding alarmed. “What are you talking about? Why would you do that?”

“‘Cos we were high on coke,” Mia says.

“ _Mia_!” Amir hisses, elbowing her.

Zayn’s lightheadedness worsens. He grips the table, feeling that he’ll fall through the floor to the beach below if he doesn’t hang onto something. Louis is clinging to his shoulder like he thinks the same of himself.

At that exact moment, with the preternatural ability of waiters to show up right when you’re having a traumatic moment out at dinner with your family, theirs arrives and smiles at them. “Hi, I’m Toby, I’ll be your server tonight! Can I get you guys any drinks?”

“A beer,” Zayn says to him. “Multiple beers.”

“ _Dad_ ,” his children cry out in unison, and Louis says, “Not funny, mate.”

“I’m kidding,” he says to the confused waiter. “I’m sober. I’ll have, um...” He doesn’t want any fancy rich people shit right now. What did he like when he was a young teenager? He can barely remember. “D’you have Irn Bru?”

“I’m sorry?” Toby says.

“Never mind. Dr. Pepper.”

“Gin rocks,” Louis says.

“What brand?”

“Just your most expensive one. And make it a double, thanks mate.”

“Oka-ay,” Toby agrees, masterfully masking the curiosity he must feel. “And for you, miss?”

“Dr. Pepper sounds good,” Mia says.

“Oh?” Zayn scoffs. “You sure you two don’t want _Cokes_?”

Amir snorts.

“Don’t you fuckin’ laugh at that,” he snaps. “Furious at both of you.”

“I’m good with water,” Amir says to the terrorized Toby, who gratefully hurries away.

“Who was on coke?” Louis says, his voice low. ”Just you two, or everyone?”

“Just me, Amir, and Jason,” Mia says. “Don’t worry, not your precious Sunday. Not Evan, either.”

“My _precious Sunday_? The fuck is that about? You’re trying to twist it around on me that you’re making bad decisions? You’re better than that, Mia. We’re closer than that.”

Mia stares down at her water, looking abashed, color rising in her cheeks.

“I only had a little,” Amir appeals to no one in particular. “It was after the wedding, okay? I wasn’t high at the wedding. We were just partying. It was stupid.”

Louis slams his hand down on the table, scaring the crap out of everyone and making their silverware jump. “Bloody _fucking_ hell, we have TALKED about this,” he barks. “We’ve talked about drugs, to both of you, at length!”

“Is this a regular thing?” Zayn demands. “This something you two do, have been doing?”

“No,” Mia says. “I’d only done it once before. It obviously isn’t good for me, and I get that now, okay?” She looks up, her blue eyes flicking between them. “I’m being totally transparent here. I’m done with coke.”

“Amir?” Louis says, folding his arms across his chest.

“I’ve done it a couple times,” Amir mumbles. Now it’s his turn to stare down at the table.

“Right, you’re both going back to therapy,” Louis says. “This level of like, impulsivity — I’m worried, I properly am. I don’t mean that in a hurtful way. I worry you never really got proper care after the wildfire… I know you went, but you didn’t go for very long, and you’re behaving in a way that I sort of —“ He interrupts himself. “It’s not good.”

Zayn looks down at his fingers, twisting his wedding band. He knows he’s about to be brought up as a warning, and it hurts every time, but his kids need to hear it.

“And I am really fuckin’ angry that with, y’know, a family history of addiction, you two are just playing around with cocaine like it’s nothing,” Louis says. There it is.

“Dad,” Amir sighs.

“No, don’t _Dad_ me. You’ve seen what Zayn’s gone through. You know how much he’s struggled, going in and out of rehab. If I had it my way, neither of you’d touch anything besides weed.”

“Have not been _in and out of rehab_ ,” Zayn scoffs, unable to keep quiet. “Been to rehab twice.”

“Three times,” Louis corrects.

“Nah, that first one doesn’t count. That was like… a spa.”

”Whatever, regardless,” Louis says, “you are an alcoholic.”

“Right, yeah, no, I get that,” Zayn says, then looks at his kids and addresses them firmly: “You both need to be aware of that, at all times, and I expect better decision-making from you at this point. You partied in secondary, yeah, I get it, fine. But you’ve both left uni now. You’re starting to be real adults, at this point. You’ve both got jobs that pay well enough for you to partially support yourselves. I expect more from you.”

They look back at him like sad little Muppets. They really do hate disappointing him.

“I agree,” Louis says.

The waiter comes back, then, forcing them into an unnatural silence. They accept their drinks with demure thank-yous.

Halfway through a sip, Mia glances up like she’s seen something, then smiles and waves at someone a ways behind Louis and Zayn. She nudges Amir. “Look, down the balcony, it’s Gretchen and Logan. And Todd, I think?”

Amir, who was glumly staring at his water, looks up and waves too.

“Is it cool if we go say hi?” Mia says to Louis and Zayn. “Just for a second? We haven’t seen them since high school.”

Zayn shrugs. “You’re twenty-three,” he says. “Don’t need my permission to say hullo to people.”

“Me and your dad could use a mo to talk in private, anyway,” Louis says. “Go on.”

Mia and Amir slip out of their booth, looking grateful to make an escape.

Louis drains his glass of gin almost entirely in one go, then has a sip of Zayn’s Dr. Pepper to chase it. “I want a cigarette,” he says hoarsely.

“I’ve got ‘em in the car,” Zayn offers.

“No, I don’t really want one. I’ve quit. You should too.”

“I have quit. I’ve just got ‘em in the car.”

“For what?”

“In case,” he says evasively.

Louis looks at him for a moment.

“Don’t give me the face,” Zayn pleads.

“What face?”

“The, y’know, ‘this is all your fault’ face.”

“I never said it was your fault!” Louis cries. “It’s both our faults! Fifty-fifty!”

“Oh. Well.” Zayn draws a little smiley face in the condensation on his drink. “Good.”

“I can’t believe our baby got married,” Louis groans. He buries his face in his hands, then burps daintily and hiccups.

Zayn starts laughing. “What was _that_?”

“Ughhh. I haven’t drank in forever. Barely drank the whole tour.”

“Seriously?”

“I couldn’t,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “I was too busy. I get the most rotten hangovers now, if I’d go out and get wasted with me team, I’m useless the next day. And I couldn’t be useless any of the days.”

“You smoked weed, though?”

“Oh, yeah, of course.”

Zayn reaches over to rub his shoulder.

“I miss Liam,” Louis murmurs. “And my boys. I’m going crazy, I haven’t seen ‘em for so long and now I’m _so_ close, but I can’t go home yet…”

“Yeah, I’ve been there,” Zayn says, turning the rub into a bracing pat.

They’re quiet for a moment. Zayn looks out over the ocean. A weird calm has settled over him now — some of his most nagging fears for his children have been realized, and it doesn’t feel as bad as he thought. As angry and scared as he is, he also knows they’re grown adults, and to a large extent he has faith in them to not ruin their lives with terrible decisions. He trusts the people they’ve become, he’s realizing.

Doing coke isn’t ideal, but Zayn is also aware that most people have at least tried it once in their lives. Getting married at twenty-two is extremely not ideal, to a much larger extent, but at least Amir isn’t pregnant. And Zayn is now retreating safely into denial by telling himself that they’re so young it’s nearly guaranteed they’ll get divorced within a few years, anyway. He would do anything to spare Amir that pain, since he knows how it feels, but it looks like it’s too late for that now. So all he can do is switch gears and present himself as the supportive dad, and then he’ll be there to help his son through the fallout.

Mia losing nine grand gambling is red flag behavior, but then again, Zayn and Harry have each lost tens of thousands at a time themselves in those floating poker games of theirs. He knows Mia, and he knows she probably won’t be stupid enough to make that mistake twice.

Zayn looks at Louis, who drops one hand and peeks at him.

“What are you thinking?” Zayn says.

“Um,” Louis says. “That as upset as we are about the coke, I think it’s a fairly standard experimentation, and I’m glad they at least told us?”

“Yeah, I was thinking the same.”

“It’s that fucking Jason,” Louis says. “As soon as she said Jason was there, I knew. He probably picked it up for them. Little Wall Street shit. I don’t think coke’s in their normal routine, but I bet it’s in his.”

“It better not be in theirs.”

“I can’t believe that twerp was at our son’s wedding, and we weren’t.”

Zayn glances behind his shoulder; Mia and Amir are perched on the edges of one of the sofa-booths about twenty feet away, chatting with their friends. Mia laughs, and he smiles without meaning to, watching her. She laughs the way he and Louis used to, before life got on top of them.

“I think they’re good kids,” Zayn says softly. “I really do. Scaring the shit out of us right now, yeah, but generally good kids.”

“Yeah.”

“They're just too much like us, that’s all.”

Louis laughs, then exhales. “This marriage thing…”

Zayn turns back around, leaning an elbow on the wooden table and glancing at Louis, who’s tearing his paper napkin into shreds now. “Dunno what to say about that.”

“Guess there’s nothing really to say, y’know? He’s of age, he’s twenty-two. We’ll just push him away if we keep disapproving.”

“Exactly,” Zayn says. “He’s twenty-two. He’s how old I was when I became a dad. And I look at him, and to me he looks like he’s twelve years old. ‘S’givin’ me the fucking willies, honestly.”

His voice shakes, his gut churning. Louis looks at him with pained understanding.

“I just want to protect him,” Zayn says.

“I know.”

“I really wish it wasn’t that fucking Evan kid.”

“I know… you’ve always had it out for him their whole relationship, and I can’t really say I feel the same. Actually, I’m rather fond of him, these days.”

“He’s just — he’s lost.”

“Not really. He just got a degree and a certification.”

“An associate’s. The kid’s a millionaire, and he’s got himself an associate’s, so he can go stand around in a field all day.”

“Zayn,” Louis says tenderly. “That’s not what he does. He’s interested in, y’know, preservation and conservation, that shit. Helping out the little animals. He’s good to Amir, he’s a nice kid.”

“I know he is! And yeah, sure, nice kid, whatever! It isn’t about Evan, honestly. I don’t want Amir married to _anybody,_ right now. He’s special. You know it, I know it. He’s got bigger things ahead of him. I didn’t want this for him, I didn’t want him to — if they were gonna break up, maybe they should’ve just broken up! Not get married! Go ahead and break up while they still can, right? Shit, they always could’ve got back together later!”

Louis lifts his head fully and looks at Zayn with curiosity, like he’s realizing something. “While they still can,” he repeats, like he’s remembering something.

Zayn, uncomfortable, says, “What?”

“Holy shit,” Louis says. “I’ve just realized... You don’t think Amir is you. You think Amir is _Harry_.”

“What?” Zayn exclaims, laughing. “What’re you talking about?”

“I’m right, I know I am. All this talk about how lost Evan is, how he doesn’t deserve Amir, how he’s going to screw up his career — this is all shit I heard you say about yourself, way back when.”

His face hot, Zayn says, “I always had more direction in my life than that kid does, and I came from _nothing_ , and he was born with a fuckin’ silver spoon, so I don’t really take your point, Lou.”

“Zayn, I’m absolutely not slagging you off. I didn’t say _I_ think it. I said I think you’re makin’ a subconscious comparison, just in the context of their relationship.”

“I disagree.”

“You don’t compare Amir to Harry in your head at all?”

Zayn falters. “Maybe,” he admits. “There’s some similarities. I’m surprised to hear _you_ think so.”

“I actually can’t believe I never twigged to this before,” Louis says. “‘Cos I know how you are with that self-loathing shit.”

Zayn finds himself annoyed in the way he always is when Louis is being a self-righteous prick about something that Zayn isn’t ready to hear yet. “Yeah, whatever,” he mutters. “I don’t need home truths from you, right now. Not at all relevant to what we’re dealing with.”

“Fine. But, y’know, you can’t be saying shit like ‘fuck Evan’ anymore. He’s our son-in-law, now.”

Zayn groans at this. “I didn’t even mean it. I was just shocked.”

“I was too, but you need to lighten up.”

“I can try.”

“All I ask.” Louis is quiet for a moment. “It really is probably our fault,” he says. “Can’t think of any other reason for a child of divorce to just up and decide to get married at twenty-two. He wants to give himself what we never gave him.”

“We were married,” Zayn protests.

Louis looks over at him with a wan expression. “Divorce was finalized before he turned five. He doesn’t remember us together. The first memories he ever made are of his parents splitting up.”

“Worse things have happened to people.”

“So what, Zayn? You’re allowed to feel sorry for him. He’s our little boy. He had a tough time of it, you know that, he didn’t understand what had happened. Don’t you remember? Whichever one of us he was with, he’d follow around the house, he’d cry if we left his sight. He regressed on his potty training, he stopped talking as much, he had stomachaches and nightmares, he kept asking me if it was his fault you moved out —“

“I remember! I remember, alright? But that was a lifetime ago!”

“Doesn’t matter, it’s developmental.”

“I just want him to be tough,” Zayn says, with an ache in his heart. “I want him to be okay. He shouldn’t need anybody, at this age. Scares me to think he can’t, y’know, cope, like. I mean, what about after we’re gone?”

“Everybody needs somebody,” Louis says.

They fall quiet again, and Louis scoots closer, leaning his head on Zayn’s shoulder.

Zayn reaches up and strokes his hair. “Does it ever get less exhausting?” he mutters.

Louis laughs. “Maybe someday. Maybe when they’re forty.”

“Then they’ll be having midlife crisises.”

“Right. Shit.”

Louis lifts his head when the kids return, sliding back into their seats with apprehensive looks. Mia keeps fiddling with the hem of her too-large Sacramento SC t-shirt, and Amir is chewing his lower lip.

“Amir?” Louis says.

“Yeah?”

Louis reaches across the table and takes his hand. “I just wanted to say… congratulations, love.”

Amir’s jaw tightens up again, and he nods, his fringe flopping down onto his forehead.

Zayn reaches out and lays his hand over their clasped ones. Amir’s eyes get misty.

“Congratulations,” he repeats.

“Thanks,” Amir whispers.

Mia reaches over and adds her own hand to the pile, smiling.

“Team fuckup,” she says.

Louis laughs. “Team fuckup.”

*

Zayn follows them in his car back to Louis and Liam’s wee secret villa in Beverly Hills that they bought after they moved away. It’s where they stay when they need to be in L.A. for work things, and where they used to stay when Mia had an overnight home game. It’s tucked away on a leafy private street, at the top of a steep hill, with only a gate and some spiked fencing to protect it from outsiders.

Louis goes inside to ring up Liam, and presumably fill him in on everything, but Zayn stays outside on the porch with the kids. He has a seat next to Mia on the porch swing, and she leans against him like she did when she was a kid.

“Nine grand, huh?” he says, as they gently swing back and forth.

Amir, curled up on a chaise beside them, snorts.

“I don’t know how it happened!” Mia says. “I kept trying to get out of the hole, and I just started hemorrhaging money.”

“That’s how casinos operate, love. The dealer probably made you as a mark. Rich girl, nice clothes, not an experienced gambler, under the influence…”

Mia sighs. “Yeah.”

Zayn nudges her. “Want me to teach you poker? It’s fun. Blackjack is stupid, it’s pure luck. Poker’s about skill.”

“Sure,” she says.

Amir laughs. “Are you turning Mia into a card shark? Am I gonna turn on ESPN and see her on the World Series of Poker wearing stupid little glasses?”

“When would _you_ ever turn on ESPN?” Mia teases him. He tosses a pillow at her.

“No hitting,” Zayn says on autopilot.

Amir gets to his feet, shaking his right hand out and wincing in pain as he does.

“Alright?” Zayn says.

“Yeah,” he says. “Hand’s bothering me. I’m gonna get some Advil, you guys want anything?”

“Yeah, g’us some cocaine and nine thousand dollars,” Zayn says.

Amir laughs as he heads into the house, and Mia pats Zayn on the chest. “Are you gonna be busting our balls forever?” she says.

“Pretty much.”

With Amir gone, the two of them sit there in companionable quiet, looking out over the leafy street below. This is a nice neighborhood; kids are out riding their bicycles, playing and laughing in the waning days of summer.

“What’d you even do on coke?” Zayn says. “Tell me you had some fun, at least.”

“Actually, the first thing we did was get a karaoke booth and sing oldass One Direction songs.”

Zayn makes a face. “You know they’ve got like, Cirque du Soleil in Vegas? Beautiful women? Live music? Pools? Clubs?”

“We did some of that! I think we just wanted to feel like kids again, for a minute.”

“I’m just teasin’ you. I guess that is sort of sweet.”

They’re quiet again.

“Dad?” Mia says, in a small voice. “I’m sorry.”

“About what? The drugs, or the nine grand? Or letting Amir get married?”

“Um…” She stretches her legs out, letting them dangle in the air as the swing rocks a tiny bit from Zayn’s lazy movements of it. “None of those, actually. I meant I’m sorry I’ve been kind of hard on you, these last few years.”

A lump develops in his throat.

“I think the stuff that scares me about you is stuff I have in me too,” Mia admits.

Zayn reaches up and strokes her head, smoothing her hair back. “Scares you?” he says in his hoarse, almost-spent voice.

“Yeah,” she admits.

“What scares you, loves?”

“I mean… you relapsing again? You being depressed. I’m afraid of you breaking up with Harry, and being alone, and going back to dating weird twenty-three-year-olds who don’t actually care about you.”

“Oi, oi,” Zayn says, laughing. “When’d I do that?”

“After the divorce!”

“But who was weird?”

“For starters? How about that girl Mikaela, the model? She was always asking me about you behind your back, like if you were seeing anyone else, or anything.”

“She did that?” Zayn says, dismayed. “To my eight year old? Christ, sorry. What’d you tell her?”

“I said you were, just to get rid of her,” Mia says. “But I think you actually were, anyway, ‘cos I found some guy’s briefs in your bathroom around then.”

“Christ,” he says again, with more passion. “Yeah, me and her weren’t exclusive. And she ghosted me, so, thanks for a bullet dodged, apparently.”

She laughs. “You’re welcome.”

“Yasmeen, I don’t, um…” He sighs. “I understand you’ve got, y’know, reason to worry about me, and had reason to be upset with me. I know it’s been hard on you, er. Knowing what happened between me and your dad.”

“Knowing what you did, you mean?”

“However you want to look at it.”

“But I don’t want to hang onto that shit,” Mia says quietly. “It’s just hard for me… I dunno. I feel like I can’t control how I react to anything.”

“Like what?”

“Like anything! My job, Aya, my life… even about Amir getting married. I know you probably feel like that was me and him, like, plotting shit behind you guys’s back like when we were kids, but I seriously got after him about it. I was asking him all the same things you and Dad were. I’m trying to play it cool with him now, but I feel the same way you do, I swear.” She drops her voice. “I don’t think they should’ve gotten married.”

Zayn is relieved to hear this. “Why didn’t you talk him out of it?”

“I tried, Dad. He really loves Evan, okay? They really love each other.”

Zayn tips his head back, staring at the ceiling. The swing slows to a halt.

“Change the things you can,” he murmurs. “Accept what you can’t.”

“And have the wisdom to know the difference,” Mia finishes.

Zayn very gently touches his fist to her cheek in a mock punch. She smiles.

“You’re gonna be fine,” he tells her. “Just for the love of God quit getting in fights, first of all. And you know what, that bit ain’t me, you can’t blame me for that. That’s all the Louis in you. He was a hellcat at your age.”

She laughs again.

“You ‘ave to learn to take a deep breath and walk away. Quit letting everyone bait you. You know what makes people want to bait you? Success. Talent. Privilege. Good looks. Good luck. ‘Avin’ a blessed life. Just accept that if they resent you for some reason, you’ve already won, so _mashallah_ and move the fuck on. ‘Cos at this point in your life, you’re asking for an assault charge one of these days.”

Mia nods. “I know.”

“And don’t do fuckin’ cocaine anymore. It’s not worth it. Dumbest drug there is. You come down from it and you want more straight away, and it’s not even that great when you’re on it. Learn to enjoy life for what it is.”

“I try to,” she says. “I do try.”

“I know. Being twenty-three is hell. You couldn’t pay me to go back.”

Mia smiles wryly.

“Look, you’ll get through what all you’re going through,” Zayn says. “I had a hard time around your age, I thought my life was over.”

“Oh, thanks.”

“No, no, not ‘cos I became a dad. ‘Cos of everything. I’d made loads of impulsive decisions… I thought I’d never get a second chance at anythin’. I thought I’d already blown it. Now I look back and laugh about how stupid that was, and I look around at what a great life I’ve got, and none of it’s anything I ever could’ve had if I’d given up and just gone ahead and drank myself to death. I had to fight, that’s all.”

Mia nods. “Yeah.”

“You’ve just started your life,” Zayn says. “Let it play out. Relax a bit. Don’t be so impatient to get where you’re going. Me and your dad, we’re both very proud of you. You’re a fighter, yeah? You’re tough. You just like to throw these pity parties for yourself, is your problem, you haven’t learned how to take your L and move on. But you’ll get through it.”

“Okay, okay. Thanks.”

Zayn smiles at her. “Just doing my job.”

“Thank you,” she says again, more quietly.

“Anytime.”

*

Evan calls when Amir is hanging out in the kitchen, rifling through the cabinets for something to eat (there’s nothing in the fridge besides a couple condiments) and listening to Louis talk with Liam on the phone in the living room. He didn’t end up eating anything at Nobu, he was too stressed out, so now he’s starving.

Amir pops his earpiece out of his watch and slips it into his ear, then shakes his wrist to transfer the call. “Wassup?”

“Hey,” Evan says. He sounds weird. “So.”

“So,” Amir says, imitating his serious voice. “What’s going on? Did you tell them?”

“No.”

“No? Isn’t it like, midnight there?”

“Yeah. I’m out on the beach.”

“What’s going on? Did you not find the dogs, or something?”

“Oh, nah, we found them hours ago,” Evan says. His voice crackles from what sounds like wind. “But then my dad got a call at dinner.”

“Yeah?” Amir finds a jar of peanut butter and starts looking for spoons. “Everything okay?”

“Uh, no,” Evan says shakily. “Well, I mean, as far as my family being okay and stuff, yeah. But the Birches are apparently trying to do a hostile takeover of my dad’s company.”

Amir stops rifling in the utensil drawer and straightens up, the back of his neck tingling. “What?”

“Yeah.”

“Wait, _what?_ ”

“I know.”

“Was that why that guy came up to us at the bar?”

“Rowan? Yeah. Apparently the Birches found out I flew to London and they got panicky, ‘cos they thought I knew what was going on and that my dad sent me to deal with it and do a face-to-face meeting.” Evan laughs. “Like I’m involved at all, or like my dad tells me fucking anything. Anyway, my dad had no idea, but Rowan was trying to feel me out and see if he did. I guess once he figured out I didn’t know shit about dick, that I was just there for you, he gave his guys the go ahead to start approaching our shareholders.”

“Why would it matter if you did know?”

“They wanted to have all their, like, chess pieces in place before they formally informed us, or whatever.” Evan exhales. “So basically the entire vacation is fucked. Everyone’s panicking. My dad choppered out like, all of his top guys from New York, so the house is full of suits, and everyone’s just, like… y’know. Henry threw a bottle of whiskey through a window and then went off with his friends in the Bugatti.”

“Typical Henry.”

“Yeah. And my mom took a bunch of Valium and went to bed. So… not really a great time to tell them I got married.”

Amir is hit by the heady realization that this actually affects him. This is his family, now, legally. The company is part of his life, too. This potentially affects his future with Evan.

He pities Evan for his parents. They do love him, but they’re both so distant in their own ways. His mother is a narcotized mess who refuses to face the reality of Evan’s estrangement, and his dad is an emotionally remote control freak.

“So what’s gonna happen?” Amir says. He hears Louis laugh lightheartedly from the living room at something Liam said, and feels a weird mix of emotions: grateful for him as a dad, and jealous of him for his easy, drama-free relationship with Liam. Maybe that’s just a perk of being old.

“Well,” Evan says. “They’re fighting it. We’re just circling the wagons, right now. It’s gonna hit the press tomorrow.”

“Are you part of the wagons?”

There’s a pause where Evan doesn’t answer. It sounds like he’s vaping.

“I am,” Evan says, exhaling. “I mean… I feel the way I feel about my dad, and the company, but like, it’s my family, y’know? We have to be a united front.”

“Of course, yeah. You should get some sleep.”

“I should. I just wanted to let you know what was going on.”

“No, thanks for that.”

“‘Cos we’re, um.” Evan goes quiet, and then says in a happily conspiratorial kind of way: “We’re married.”

“We’re married,” Amir agrees, his heart dancing with joy. He can still scarcely believe it.

“I’ll try to tell them tomorrow, I promise. They have to know, especially with this shit going on, ‘cos the Birches could use it against my dad. So, I will.”

“Are you a hundred percent sure you don’t want me there as backup?”

“No, Meer, please, do the concert. Let me handle it. You don’t need to be around this shit, it’s toxic.”

“Okay,” Amir says reluctantly. He’d forgotten about the concert, in fact.

“I’ll let you go,” Evan says. “You’re with your parents, right?”

“Yeah, but I don’t have to go, if you want to talk.”

“You told them, right?”

“Oh! Yeah! Fuck, I forgot to text you. Yeah, I did.”

“How’d they take it?” Evan says, sounding nervous.

“Not too bad. I mean, they were pissed, but I actually thought it’d be worse.”

“Good, good. Is Zayn gonna kill me?”

“There’s a non-zero chance he might kill you.”

“I wish I could get him to like me,” Evan says. “I really want him to… I know that’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid. And he doesn’t dislike you as a person, or anything, I swear. He’s just protective of me.”

“Is he like this with Mia?”

“Kind of,” Amir says. “Not as much, but it’s different. He has, y’know…big dreams for me.”

“Dads are tough.”

“Yeah.”

“Me and him should do something together,” Evan says. “Go on a fishing trip or something.” Amir laughs, and he adds, “I’m serious!”

“No, I mean, yeah, if you want to, if you think it could help. If you can get him to agree to it.”

“I think I can sell him on me,” Evan says. “I grow on people. Right?”

Amir smiles. “You grew on me.”

“Yeah! You thought I was boring when we first started hanging out.”

“I called you Moleface.”

“What?”

“Behind your back,” Amir says, laughing. “To Jason and Tyler.”

“I only have one mole on my face!”

“I know! And it’s cute. But I didn’t think so when I was seven.”

“Asshole,” Evan says, laughing too. “ _Moleface_? Are you serious?”

“Deadass, ask Jason, he’ll tell you. Listen, go to bed, alright? Get some rest.”

”Yeah.” Evan sighs. “Hey… sorry you married into this shit.”

“Don’t be sorry, I didn’t marry a company.” He pauses a beat for effect. “I married Moleface.”

“If you say Moleface one more time, I’m gonna divorce you.”

“Go to sleep,” Amir sings. “Bye-e.”

“Bye, baby.”

Amir heads into the living room, where Louis is just getting off the phone with his own husband. This house is nice in a kind of bland, impersonal way, like an expensive hotel suite. There’s a painting of a sailboat race on the wall behind the plain gray wraparound couch, and some very utilitarian lamps. An entertainment center with no tchotkes on it, just a massive TV and a few dusty gaming consoles. Behind the couch, a plain staircase stretches upstairs, to several even more impersonal bedrooms.

“Hi sweets,” Louis says hoarsely.

Amir goes over and sits down beside him. “Hi. How’s Liam?”

Big sigh from Louis. “He’s fine, but I told him you’d got married — he says congratulations, by the way, he’s very happy for you — and about Mia’s, erm, tribulations, and then he did that sort of Liam-y beatin’ around the bush thing, and told _me_ that Paddy’s been suspended from school for starting an essay-selling ring.”

“What!” Amir laughs. “That’s awesome. Did he really?”

“It’s not awesome,” Louis says waspishly. “D’you have any idea how much we spend to send those boys to that school? He’s got four years left and he’s already trying to get himself expelled.”

“Yeah, but that’s so Patrick, that’s just how he is. He just needs to be a grown-up already, so he can put all that evil genius energy into something good.”

Louis sighs. “Yeah. I know. This just really hasn’t turned out to be the relaxing time I was picturing when I thought about finally being home from tour.”

Amir feels guilty, as this is partially his fault. “He’ll be fine,” he says. “I was, like, a troublemaking asshole at that age, too. I got over it.”

Louis just smiles at him.

“Wow, you could disagree with me,” he adds.

“Hey, you said it, not me.”

“Dad!”

Laughing, Louis reaches for his arm and turns it over, looking at his forearm where his latest tattoo is. Amir had been wearing a hoodie at dinner, and only just pushed the sleeves up when he came into the stuffy house. “Et in pulverem reverteris?” he says, tripping over the last two words. He sounds like he’s a little tipsy from his dinner gin.

“Latin,” Amir says. “‘And to dust you will return.’”

Louis snorts and runs his thumb over the tattoo. “You’ve always been such a lighthearted kid, you know that?”

“I get it from you!”

“Naw, that shit’s from Zayn. I’m a cheery bloke.”

“Please. Your new album was a little dark.”

“Oh, c’mon, no it wasn’t.”

“Yeah it was. Dad, seriously. Maybe not the songs I played on, but some of the others. And every review of it was like, wow, this is good shit, but he’s a little angry!”

Louis laughs and leans back against the couch pillows, stretching his arms over his head. “I’m not angry.”

“You sounded it.”

“I just had a lot of shit pent up. I hadn’t gotten to release an entire album of me own since you were knee-high, I had some things to express. You read all my reviews? That’s sweet of you.”

“Yeah, I was curious,” Amir says. “I wanted to see if they said anything about me on piano. Plus, they always slip a mention of Pops in.”

Louis rolls his eyes. “Yeah, I’ve noticed that.”

“Was any of the album about him?”

“Nah,” Louis says. “I got all that out of my system on me second record.”

“I kind of felt like that one song was. _The Rest Of It?_ ”

“Oh.” Louis laughs. “That track, um… it was about a load of things, could be taken several different ways. Actually, me and Liam worked on that together, so no, it wasn’t solely about your dad, although it ended up being about divorce a bit. But not everythin’s literally autobiographical, either, not even my stuff. You’re a musician, you know that. We take liberties, do metaphors.”

“I do, but it’s hard to believe that when it’s your dad’s music.”

“I know. Poor lad. Must be a weird thing for you kids.” He rubs at his nose. “I do think about that, y’know, now that you’re all older. I try not to censor myself, but… the shit on my earlier albums, I wouldn’t’ve put those songs out today, I don’t think.”

“We can still go back and listen to them,” Amir points out.

Louis grins. “But I bet you don’t. And they’re not in the public consciousness, either. Don’t have to hear them on the radio and things.”

“That’s true, I guess,” Amir says. “You know, it’s weird, Dad’s album was like, light-hearted, compared to yours. Actually kind of mellow.”

“Sex jams,” Louis says wisely.

“Eww-wuh.”

“I thought it sounded very Harry-influenced, honestly. Sounded like that producer he’s been working with, the last five or so years. Asia Doubleday, I think her name is? She’s got a specific sound.”

“I liked it, though,” Amir says. “The melodies they had me do were fun. It’s good, like, driving through Monterey music.”

Louis laughs again. “There’s a genre for you.”

“So, um… Evan hasn’t told his parents about us getting married, yet, ‘cos apparently the family that took over News Corp is now trying to do a hostile takeover of his dad’s company. So that’s like this whole crazy crisis for them.”

Louis’ brow leaps up. “Oh, shit.”

“Yeah. He’s gonna try to tell them tomorrow, though.”

“Jesus. He doing alright? Doesn’t seem like it’d be fun to be around his family during all that.”

“He’s okay,” Amir says. “He was actually weirdly, like… ‘Oh, I have to stand by my family, we have to circle the wagons together, I’m not even thinking about my drama with my dad.’”

“That’s good,” Louis says gently. “You want to be married to someone who thinks family comes first, even if things are difficult.”

Amir fiddles with his wedding band, which he’d put back on after dinner. “I guess.”

Louis reaches out for his hand. “Oh, so you’ve got a ring? Can I see?”

Amir puts his hand in Louis’, and Louis twiddles the band in his fingers, then slides it upward slightly.

“It’s from the chapel, it’s cheap,” Amir says. “The rings were part of the wedding package.”

“Yeah, it’s too big for you. And it’s turning your finger green.”

“Oh, shit, is it?”

Louis laughs. “Why don’t you let me buy you and Evan a couple of nice ones? Solid gold, or whatever metal you’d like? That can be my wedding present.”

“Sure, yeah,” Amir says. “I was thinking tungsten?”

Louis drops his hand, grins, and taps his own band with his thumb. “Me and Payno’s are tungsten, actually.”

“Yeah? That’s funny.”

“I’ll text our jeweler in the morning.”

“Thanks.”

Louis kicks his feet up onto the coffee table, making a copy of FADER fall onto the floor. “You excited for tomorrow?”

“Oh,” Amir says, and his stomach flutters. “I keep forgetting about that, actually. I’m mostly nervous.”

“Nervous? Don’t be. You’re gonna be great.”

“I wish you could be there to introduce me to the band and stuff.”

“Me too,” Louis says sadly. “I can’t bail on this dinner, though, I’m a co-emcee.”

“No, go help cancer kids, I’ll be fine.”

“You will be,” Louis says, closing his eyes like he might nap. “You’ll be more than fine. I have all the faith in the world.”

“Okay,” Amir says.

Louis pats him on the back. “Hey,” he whispers. “Between you and me, you’re really not pregnant?”

“Dad, no! Why would I lie about that?”

“I dunno, to prevent Zayn an aneurysm? You didn’t tell him last time.”

“But if I was gonna keep it, he’d find out eventually.”

“Right, but it’d spread out the news. Tell him you got married, wait a month, tell him you’re knocked up. Then his blood pressure doesn’t quite reach four hundred over two hundred.”

Amir laughs. “I’m not pregnant,” he says.

Louis cracks an eye open. “You two thinking about kids?”

“Right now? No.”

“Good. You’ve got time.”

“I don’t want to wait forever, though,” Amir admits.

“No?”

“No. I want to, y’know, be young enough to be friends with my kids.”

“Are we friends?” Louis says, smiling.

“Yeah! What, you think we aren’t?”

“Ooh, this is awkward,” Louis jokes. “Yeah, I really think of you more as an acquaintance.”

“Shut up, you’re not funny,” Amir says, laughing. “I mean, you’re friends with me and Mia more than you’re friends with the twins, anyway.”

“Well, but you’re adults now.”

“No, it’s been like that forever. You’re just more of like, a traditional dad with them.”

“Reckon you’re right about that. I don’t know which is better for kids, in the long run.”

“I was thinking more about myself than my potential kids,” Amir admits.

Louis nods. “Fix that mindset before you have any,” he advises him. “And, y’know. Being older has its perks. You’re less selfish, more settled.”

“When were you selfish?”

“Oh, sometimes,” Louis sighs. “I dunno. I could’ve read to you more. Done more things, gone to Mommy and Me or whatever the fuck. When you two got a little older, I left you with the nanny a good bit, or dropped you with me family, or Zayn’s… I wanted to have my cake and eat it too, sometimes, especially after the divorce.”

“I don’t remember it like that,” Amir insists. “I remember you being around, like, all the time.”

“Good, I’m glad. But it was tough, being young. I got tired of parenting easily. It’s such a demanding job, and it’s a selfish time in your life. And it’s so hard when you’re the, y’know, primary caretaker. I ‘ad no idea, before I took it on.”

Amir keeps playing with his wedding band, sliding it up and down. “Hey… what was it like when you first got together with Dad? Before you got married?”

“What makes you ask?”

“Nothing, really. I’ve been trying to imagine you guys just, like, dating, and I can’t. It feels weird.”

“Oh,” Louis sighs, then hiccups. “We didn’t really get a chance to date in the traditional sense. We had a bit of a relationship on tour, and then we had the horrible falling out, and then I found out I was pregnant.”

“But you made up, you got back together.”

“Aye, yeah.”

“So what was it like after that?”

“Fine.”

“Fine? Dad.”

Louis hesitates. “Alright, in the beginning, it was bad. We were rowing a lot, I was very emotional. Lot going on for both of us.”

Amir nods. “So… why’d you even get back together?”

Louis’ tired eyes study him, like he’s wondering what Amir actually wants to know. “I wanted him in his daughter’s life,” he says. “I wanted him to have that experience of raising her with me. I wanted very badly for him to rise to the occasion, although it was properly hard for me to ask for that of him.”

“Why?”

Louis shrugs. “He’d just abandoned me a few months prior,” he says, his voice crackly from laryngitis. “He’d said some pretty nasty things about me, about the band. I know you know all this… I sort of wish you didn’t, but it is what it is. Bottom line is, it was very scary for me to be vulnerable after that. I had to swallow a lot of pride.”

Amir is quiet.

“But I was pregnant, and I had to drop out of tour ‘cos I got complications, and the band had had this awful splinterin’ that put a target on my back for the entire world. I was a punchline everywhere I went, everyone was starin’ at me, speculating on me, chatting shit. So I did very much want Zayn’s support, y’know, as he was the dad, and he was going through tough shit of his own. And I sort of, ah… the way it was between us, the people that we both are, I reckon being co-parents would’ve been a lot harder if we weren’t together. We would’ve been absolutely seething, watching each other date other people.”

“You did date someone else, though,” Amir points out. “You dated Liam.”

Louis is quiet for a moment. “Right. I did. And your dad was very hurt by it, which, again, you know about, wish you didn’t.”

“But I just mean, like, why did you feel so insecure, then? It seems like you had options. It seems like Dad was the one who had to worry if _you_ were gonna leave.”

Louis lets out a laugh that tails into a sigh. “It may seem like that, but reality was more complicated. And I wasn’t thinking about things in a very romantic way. When you’re pregnant, you think about things differently. I just wanted to feel like me and this little baby were gonna be in a stable situation, I wasn’t lookin’ to be swept off me feet. Any instability was really scary. Someone wanting to be with you ain’t any guarantee you can make things work, especially when you’ve got a baby on the way.”

“But did you like, actually miss being with Dad?” Amir says, feeling the achy sting of disappointment. He wants so badly for his parents to have had a real love story, even the most fleeting, tragic one.

He hiccups again. “Shit, I better not have the hiccups. Yeah, ‘course I missed him! I missed him loads… we’d been very, very close. Look, once I saw him with Mims, I didn’t worry. He adored her from the start, same with you. Once she was here, I never worried about him not bein’ a loving, involved dad.”

Amir plays with his ring some more. “Did things get better once you realized that?”

“Yeah! Yeah. When your sister came, it got loads better... partly ‘cos we had something to focus on besides ourselves.”

“Right,” Amir says. “But like, I guess what I’m really asking is, how’d you guys get to a point where you actually wanted to get married?”

Louis takes his hat off and smooths his hair back. “We just sort of let ourselves be friends again. Things were always good between us when we could be friends. It took time, but there was still a lot of love there. I loved your dad dearly, I still do.”

“He proposed ‘cos you were pregnant with me, right?”

“Aye, it wasn’t the only reason, but it was the, ah, impetus. Right after I told him about you, he asked me to marry him.”

Amir plays with his band more nervously, slipping it entirely off and then sliding it back on. “How’d you feel about that? Him asking?”

Louis puts his cap back on backwards and shrugs, smiling at Amir. “Thought it was proper responsible of him. He was doing what he felt he was supposed to.”

“Dad, that’s barely an answer.”

“Well, honestly, I didn’t have very good, romantic feelings about it, right away. I waited to say yes ‘til I’d had some time to think… couple weeks or so.”

“Wait, really?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Oh, so many reasons,” Louis says softly. “Wasn’t how I saw meself getting married, for starters. Thought I’d be older and smarter and have the traditional thing going, do it before I had kids, all that… And I was worried for your dad, to be honest with you. I mean, he’d been engaged before, a bit impulsively. So I was afraid he hadn’t really thought it through, what that would mean for him and his life, and what he was signing on for. We were so young, and he’d been having a tough go of it. I didn’t want him to, y’know, out of this sense of family responsibility, take on more than he could handle.”

“But he wanted to?”

“Oh, yeah, absolutely. He did very much want for us to be a family in the traditional sense.”

“So it wasn’t, like…” Amir struggles to phrase what he wants to ask. “He wasn’t, like, oh God, another kid, we have to get married, I’m gonna put a gun in my mouth, let’s do it anyway though?”

“No, no! No, he was on board right away, he gave me a whole speech about how it was right for us to get married, and he loved me, all that. I promise you he did. And once he got past the, y’know, shock, he was chuffed to bits I was pregnant. He wanted a little sibling for Mia. I mean, he’s tight with his older sister like you are with her, y’know?”

“Yeah. I guess that makes sense.”

“Like I said, it was me that hesitated,” Louis says. “Finally said yes when he was in the hospital for falling down the stairs.”

“For _what?”_

“Ah, he was drinking. Happened at a party… I dunno, I wasn’t there for it, ‘cos of you. He was fine, of course, I was just worried about him, so it sort of crystallized things. What, I haven’t told you this story before?”

“No, Dad, you definitely haven’t!”

“Oh, well, that’s the long and short of it. Anyway, things were nice after that, and I felt properly good on our wedding day, that was a really lovely day for us. We were so, so happy to be gettin’ married, I promise. Making things official sort of set us back on the right track.”

Amir feels terrible for both of them, hearing all this.

Louis seems to notice he’s subdued, and pats him. “I’m sorry, lad. I don’t mean to be traumatizing you, here. I had too much to drink at dinner, I’m probably bein’ too honest right now. You should warn me when you want me to be a bit more, what’s the word…”

“Circumspect?”

“Wossat mean? Discreet?”

“Yeah.”

“Then yeah,” Louis agrees.

“Nah, I wanted to hear the truth,” Amir says. “I was just wondering, I guess.” He’s quiet for a moment. “I’m not sure how Evan felt when I proposed to him.”

“Oh, love, I’m sure he felt like it was the luckiest moment of his life,” Louis says hoarsely, his smile getting wider. “Look, from what I can tell, you two have a sorta different relationship than me and your dad did. I mean, you’re young, and you have fun together like me and him did, and goof off… you’re best mates, which is great. But you’re, ah.” His voice peters out, either from emotions or the laryngitis. He coughs, then manages, “You’re more careful with each other, I think. More open, trusting…”

“Yeah?” Amir says, his heart pounding in his chest, feeling like it’s gotten too big for his ribs all of a sudden. No one knows him better than Louis, and Louis is very truthful, so this must be true.

“Yeah. You two together, you remind me of the little boys you were when you met. That, like, pure, playground love. It’s sweet.”

“You didn’t even like Evan when I first started hanging out with him,” Amir points out.

“Parents never like their kids’ best friends,” Louis says. “Not at first, anyway.”

“Is that for real?”

“I swear, it’s like the law. ‘Cos that’s probably the first person you pick for yourselves, that’s how we know you’ve started pulling away from us. And then we’re afraid they’ll get you into drugs, and things.”

Amir laughs, and they’re quiet for a moment.

“Anyway, you can read your dad’s take on us getting married in his memoir, if you don’t mind waitin’ a year,” Louis says.

“Ha, there’s no way I’m reading that,” Amir says.

“No?”

“No way! ‘Cos there’s probably gonna be stuff about me in there, and all I’d be able to think about is how many weirdo strangers are reading it.”

Louis smiles at him. “But you went lookin’ for mentions of you in our album reviews?”

“Music critics talking about me as a professional musician is different from like, you guys talking about me as your kid,” Amir explains.

Louis slowly nods, like he gets it. It’s clear he’s extremely tired.

“Dad?” Amir says, before he can close his eyes again. “I’m hungry.”

“Yeah,” Louis says, “‘cos you didn’t eat at dinner, goofy.”

“I know,” Amir says mournfully. “But can we get Joe’s Pizza?”

“Sure, order w’ever you like.”

“I meant can you order? I ran out of money coming back from Vegas. I have like, thirteen dollars in my account.”

Louis sighs deeply and pulls his phone out of his pocket, flicking it unlocked. “How on _Earth_ have you already spent — you know, one of these days I’m gonna teach you and your sister the meaning of a dollar.”

“Fine, as long as I get pizza.”

LOS ANGELES, AUGUST 13, 2039

The next morning, Louis and Amir see Mia off at the train station, waving to her from the platform as she waves back out her window. She volunteered to go help Sunday and Liam knock some sense into Patrick, which Louis was grateful for. He seems anxious that he can’t go home quite yet — he’s been checking his phone way more than normal.

“I think I like trains more than planes,” Amir says to Louis when they’re walking away, going against the thick morning rush hour crowd.

“Yeah?” Louis says. He has on the ball cap from last night, the brim tugged low over his eyes in hopes that no one will recognize him. “Slower.”

“But they’re more romantic.”

“You’re funny,” Louis says to him.

“What’s so funny about me all the time? I can’t like things?”

Louis laughs. “No, no. I just think you’d be happier living in the 1920s, which is funny.”

They walk for a while without talking, both of them lost in thought.

“Hey, what do you think the odds are that Dad bails on me tonight?” Amir says.

Zayn skipped out on coming to the station with them; he said he’d try to, but apparently when he woke up, he found his laryngitis had gotten on top of him.

“Ah, fairly high, unfortunately,” Louis says. “You know how he is when he’s sick, he’s a massive baby.”

Amir’s heart skips a beat. “So I’m gonna be alone? No one’s gonna be there?”

“I’m sure your dad’ll send Harry in his stead, if he can’t make it.”

Amir shrugs. “That’s fine, I guess.” Harry enjoys live music more than Zayn does, anyway.

“What about this show’s got you so anxious?”

They step out into the bright California day and head down the stairs into the parking lot, wandering through rows of cars.

“It’s just more people than I’m used to,” Amir says. “Hundreds.”

“You’ve done hundreds before.”

”Two hundred, max.”

“Love,” Louis says, “it’s barely different, I promise. You’ll have your stage fright initially, and then you’ll get into it, and you’ll forget you were ever anxious, and then it’ll be over. Alright… where the fuck did I park?”

He shakes his wrist hard, and a car starts beeping from behind them. They turn and see that they’ve walked right past Louis’ Range Rover.

“You’re getting old,” Amir tells him.

Louis laughs. “You didn’t twig either, what’s your excuse?”

Someone shouts, “Louis? Louis!” and they turn again. This time it’s a blonde woman in her thirties, dressed in work clothes, flagging Louis down like he’s a taxi.

Louis patiently waits for her to screech to a halt and chirps, “Hullo there.”

“Hi, hi,” she pants. “I’m so sorry to bother you like this, my name is Lucia, I’m a big fan —“

“Oh, thank you!”

“— I thought I recognized you inside, and then I came out and there you were — I was wondering if you could sign my water bottle? It’s all I have with me…”

She hands him a Nalgene. Louis grins and digs a Sharpie out of his pocket. “Of course.”

“I was so relieved when you put out another album,” Lucia says, still breathing hard, her eyes lit up. “I was a big fan of you in college. Not One Direction, but your solo stuff. It was so raw, it got me through a hard time.”

“I’m really glad to hear that,” Louis murmurs, as he tries to get a good grip on the water bottle so he can sign it. “That’s always the goal.”

“And now, it’s so weird, I’m going through a hard time _again_ , and I never thought you would do an album ever again, but you did, and it was just perfect timing. I enjoyed it so much, I can’t even tell you, it was great.”

“Thank you, thank you so much.”

Amir watches this entire exchange with curiosity; it’s very familiar to him, watching his dads and stepdads go through this, but now it feels real that this might happen to him at some point.

“There you are,” Louis says, handing her the bottle back. “Really great to meet you, love, thanks for the support.”

“Thank you!” she says breathlessly.

“D’you want a picture?”

“Shit —“ She glances back at the train station. “I’d love one, but I really have to catch my train —“

“Don’t worry, I’m proper fast at this,” Louis says, taking her phone from her and bringing her in. “There. Done. Call me out on Twitter if it’s blurry.”

Lucia takes her phone back with profuse thank yous, then moves as if to run off, but Louis cries, ”Wait, wait! Hug?” and spreads his arms.

She laughs happily and gives him a brief, tight hug before hurrying away back to the station with her water bottle swinging from her hand.

“Nice to not meet you,” Amir says under his breath.

Louis whaps him gently in the arm. “Don’t be a dickhead. That’s hard for people to do.”

“I know! It’s just rude to ignore someone who’s standing right there.”

“I guarantee she was too nervous to even notice you. Don’t take everything so personally.”

Amir follows him to the car, squinting into the sun as he hops into the passenger seat. “Hey… why does she get to be a ‘love’?”

“Huh?” Louis says, starting the car up and putting it into self-drive. It rolls into motion.

“You call your kids ‘love’, but you also call literally everyone else ‘love’, even strangers, which makes it not special.”

“Oh, my middle child,” Louis says, laughing. “Are you being serious right now?”

“No,” Amir admits. “It’s just you were on tour for forever, and I wish you could come tonight.”

Louis smiles at him. “Why don’t you invite some mates? Wouldn’t it be a nice chance to see some old high school pals, like those kids you ran into last night? You could show them what you’ve been up to since you saw them last, grab a drink after.”

“No,” Amir says immediately, shaking his head. “That’s so cringey. What if I suck?”

“Why would you suck?”

“I dunno. I just have this, like — I have this feeling about tonight, it’s making me more nervous than I’ve been in a long time, and I need to focus on not fucking up. I can’t invite anyone who’s gonna add to the nerves.”

“Okay,” Louis says, putting a hand up. “I get it.”

“Aren’t you at all worried I’m gonna fuck up and embarrass your band?”

Louis laughs very hard at this. “No, not at all! Only thing I’m worried about is you’re gonna drive yourself barmy worrying about things you shouldn’t be worrying about. Why don’t you worry about getting our lawyers on the phone to talk about a postnup?”

“Can I do that tomorrow?”

“No, you ought to call today and at least schedule a time this week to talk to them,” Louis says. “It’s just gonna be a conference call. Twenty minutes, max. But you need to get the ball rolling as soon as possible.”

Amir stares out the window as they head down the palm tree-lined street outside the station. He watches groups of tourists look around with wide eyes.

Louis reaches over and strokes his hair. “You a bit burned out, love?” he says knowingly.

Amir shrugs. “Maybe.”

“I know you’ve been working so hard lately. And it’s been a long week for you.”

“Yeah.”

They’re quiet.

“I wish I could just do stuff and not deal with all the dumb crap that comes after,” Amir says.

“Right, well… welcome to adulthood.”

MALIBU, AUGUST 13, 2039

Zayn has to wait for Harry to tromp upstairs to get ahold of him, because he left his phone and watch on the dresser last night, and he feels too shitty to eject himself from bed, walk the seven feet over there and text him.

“Harry,” he calls, when he hears him going by in the hallway. “‘Arry. Harry. Hazzy Hazzo. Haaarryyyy.”

Harry pokes his head in the door. “Need something?”

“Yeah, c’mere.”

Harry obligingly comes over and sits on the bed beside his legs. With the door now open, Zayn can hear their girls laughing down the hall. “‘Sup?”

“You busy tonight?”

Harry thinks about it. “I could move some things around,” he says. “Why?”

“Really, you’ve got _things_?” Zayn jokes, his hoarse voice disappearing for a moment before coming back. “You were already planning to abandon your sick husband?”

Harry flashes a smile at him. “I was just gonna take a call with Salome. She’s in Sydney, so it has to be tonight here. And I’m about to take Toni to get her hair done, so that’s a few hours. Why?”

“Amir’s playing that show with one of Louis’ bands tonight, and he wants someone there, but I’m not feelin’ up to it, and Louis can’t make it. I was wondering if you could go for me? Just be a friendly face. He’s already bricking it, apparently.”

“Where at?”

“The Troubadour.”

Harry nods, then smiles in a weirdly sinister way. “Definitely, I’ll be there.”

“Yeah?”

“Of course.”

“Cheers, thank you.”

The girls come bursting in, then, still giggling. “Daddy, I made you a drink,” Marlena says to Zayn, holding a cup aloft. “It’s gonna cure you.”

“Don’t,” Toni warns him. “Don’t drink it, it’s horrible.”

“It is not!” Marlena cries. “It’s, um, lemonade, wheatgrass, beet juice, orange juice, apple juice —“

Toni mimes puking, and Harry laughs.

“It’s full of antioxidants!”

“Sounds delightful,” Harry says. “Let me try it.”

Marlena hands him the cup, and he takes a sip, not reacting at all.

“Splendid,” Harry coughs. “Zayn?”

Zayn takes it warily and sniffs it, then has a sip. It’s possibly the worst thing he’s ever drank — sour like spoiled milk, but cloyingly sweet at the same time.

“Back to the drawing board on that one, sweetheart,” he says, setting the offending cup on the bedside table.

Toni tosses him a bottle of Gatorade.

“Thanks, love,” he says gratefully, and has a sip to get the taste out.

Marlena sighs in defeat. “I think it’s the beet juice that screwed it up,” she says.

“I’ll give you one thing, Lena, drinking that made me forget I feel like shit for other reasons,” Zayn says.

“Reckon she’s got a bright future in the wellness industry, actually,” Harry says. “That didn’t taste much worse than half the things I drink.”

“Yeah, we’ll put her in charge of making your bullet coffee,” Zayn says.

“Bulletproof,” Harry corrects. “I haven’t drank that in years, y’know.”

“He drinks ozone coffee, now,” Toni says helpfully.

Zayn laughs. “Right, ‘scuse me,” he says, his hoarse voice squeaking.

WEST HOLLYWOOD, AUGUST 13, 2039

Amir underestimates how bad traffic is going to be on his 2.2 mile trip from the house to the venue. He was supposed to be there at 6 p.m. sharp, and it’s 6:15 when he makes it backstage, leaving the band understandably annoyed. They’re gathered around in the dim, cramped green room, lounging on couches or the floor as they tune their instruments.

The venue manager introduces Amir, who lingers awkwardly beside her, unsure of what to do with his hands. Louis said to think grunge for his outfit, so he put a double nose hoop in along with his septum, and wore a black tee, black jeans, and boots. But the rest of the band is dressed a little more glam, and now he’s feeling like he fucked up the first impression completely.

He’s already met Hec, who hangs out at the Los Angeles house sometimes when Louis is in town, and he’s introduced additionally to Zack, the drummer, and Kylie, the bassist. She seems the most friendly to Amir out of the three of them, which is par for the course. Women always like him. Men sometimes struggle to.

“So we were hoping to get more time with you than this,” Hec says a little anxiously, plucking at his guitar. He’s Amir’s height, but burly, one of those crudely good-looking guys that usually do well as rock musicians. Like a boyish caveman. Zack is his opposite, lithe with long dark hair, and Kylie has a strong resemblance to Kathleen Hanna.

“You guys weren’t here ‘til five-thirty for soundcheck,” Amir points out. “Sorry I’m late, but I don’t think it would’ve made a huge difference.”

He misses the Amsterdam Five, or even Leftfoot — people he’s worked with before and already proven himself to. He forgot how hard it is to get other musicians to trust your skills without evidence.

Hec shrugs. “Yeah, I just have no idea how you’re gonna pick up the melodies in time.”

“It’s not a problem, as long as you have tabs,” Amir says. “I sight read and sight sing really well.”

They all look very surprised.

“You do?” Hec says.

“I’m a jazz player, I’m classically trained, of course I do,” Amir says, annoyed. “Did my dad not tell you anything about me?”

“He didn’t really have time,” Zack says. “He said you were talented, and like, I love Lou, but he is your dad, so we didn’t know how much stock to put in that.”

“There are a lot of keyboard players who can’t sight read,” Hec says. “Danny can’t.”

Amir stifles a _yikes_ face. “I can, so... just give me the music and stick me in front of the keyboard.”

Kylie laughs. “Thank God. You really are saving us here.”

“Good,” Amir says. “Can I actually get the setlist, though, so I can listen on Spotify real quick?”

“Oh, shit. Yeah,” Hec says. He turns and picks a pair of headphones up off the coffee table, then a piece of paper with a setlist scribbled on it. “Go ahead.”

Amir takes both and collapses onto a beanbag in the corner. He opens up Spotify and loses himself in the Kosmonauta catalog, eyes closed.

After about twenty minutes, Kylie comes over to him, kneeling beside him and clasping a hand on his knee. “Hi,” she mouths when he opens his eyes.

Amir takes the headphones off. “What’s up?”

She hands him a styrofoam cup. He looks inside and sees amber liquid, then the smell hits him — whiskey. “You need a drink? You seem kinda tight.”

He takes it appreciatively and downs the entire thing, about three shots worth, then grimaces against the sting in his nose. “Just a little,” he admits.

Kylie grins. “Listen, we don’t really care if we bomb tonight or not, honestly. Our tour’s almost over, we just didn’t want to hurt our rep by pulling out of this show, so you showing up was everything we needed you to do. Does that take the edge off?”

“It actually does,” Amir admits.

“Cool.”

Zack rounds the corner from the hallway, then. Amir hadn’t realized he was gone. “Okay,” he says, “there’s like a shitload of people here? Way more than we were expecting. I just took a peek, it’s crowded as fuck. Like, there’s our fans, but there’s also more press than we expected, plus suits, plus Harry Styles is up in the balcony with a bunch of security.”

Great. The edge was off for all of two seconds.

“He’s your stepdad, right?” Hec says to Amir, who nods.

Kylie fetches the whiskey off the coffee table and pours him more, which he drinks.

“Don’t get him fucked up,” Hec warns her.

Hec is either anxious about having his bandmate missing and in rehab, or he’s just generally kind of a pain in the ass. Amir can’t tell.

“I’m straight,” Amir says. “Don’t worry about me.”

“You think this is good or bad?” Zack says to Hec, sliding his hands into the pockets of his leather pants. “All the press?”

Hec shrugs. “If we die up there, it’s not our fault,” he says. “We’re down one. All we can do is give them our best.”

“I think it’s great,” Kylie says. “No such thing as bad publicity. Plus, crowd energy means a lot, and we have some real diehard fans in L.A.”

The venue manager comes around the corner, then, holding a tablet. She knocks on the wall and says, “Hey guys, your opener’s wrapping up.”

Amir’s heart skips a beat.

Hec looks right at him. “You ready?” he says.

Amir nods.

“Then let’s roll.”

*

The first two songs go about the way Amir was expecting — he feels like he’s running one step out ahead of a fire that’s lapping at his feet, learning each chord a half second before he plays it, not really feeling the music. He’s so exposed on this stage, with the audience either mere feet away or watching him with a bird’s-eye view from the balcony, but he keeps trying to hide, anyway — hide behind the piano, hide behind himself, whatever. His voice is wobbly from nerves, and he’s just barely holding his own.

The crowd knows these songs so much better than he does, it’s fucking with his head. Someone yells “Where’s Danny?” during a lull, and Amir finds that kind of amusing, but he mostly wishes a trapdoor would open up on the stage and swallow him.

While they’re getting ready for the third song, Hec comes over to him and taps him on the shoulder. “Yo, you can improvise, right? You improvise when you play jazz?”

“Yeah,” Amir says.

“Go ahead and improvise if you want, if you think that’ll loosen you up. Me and Kylie can keep the melody on track.”

Amir nods, squinting up at him through the lights. “If you’re cool with that, man.”

“One hundred percent. Open it up, get weird with it. Tour’s over, so why not?” He smiles at Amir for the first time all night, then heads back over to his mic stand.

Amir drags the keyboard toward the lip of the stage, closer to the audience. A few people nearest to him look up at him curiously and whoop in encouragement, clearly recognizing him as an outsider. He blows them a kiss, which causes more whoops.

“Alright,” Hec says into the microphone. “This next one, a few of you might recognize… it’s a song I wrote when I was spending a lot of time in Denver…”

The crowd goes apeshit. It’s _Cherry Creek,_ which is far and away their most-played track on Spotify. Is Hec really fine with Amir doing improv on their biggest hit?

“Cherry Creek!”

If not, oh well.

Amir swallows down his nausea and tries to remember the chords of that song. His brain starts to work on dissecting them and pulling them apart at the joints, rearranging them, working on how to keep them melodic while tearing them free of all predictability.

As he does, he grows calmer.

Everything from then on is a blur. The tide turns slowly over the course of the first minute of the song, as he builds momentum, until halfway through it the dam breaks. Amir stops trying to keep up and starts leading the band; he plays with the kind of fearsome furiosity he’s had at his best gigs, and the more confident he feels at the piano, the clearer and more passionate his voice is, the more he splits his range open to reveal the raspiest lows and highest falsettos he’s capable of.

The venue’s energy begins to peel away from the rest of the band and latch onto him. He feels the audience’s eyes glued to him, not Hec. He’s upstaging everyone, but he can’t stop himself — it would be like trying to stop a train.

Amir’s sense of time and space blur and vanish until they’re gone completely. All he is is his fingers and his vocal chords, and the roar of the crowd vibrating him, pulling on the strings of his tendons like he’s a guitar. He’s buoyed by it, carried out and away on it like he felt in the Dead Sea when he went there with Mia and Aya last summer. Just floating, floating, his body gone, only a mind.

They love him. They’re crazy about him. They want more, more, more of him, and the more they want the more he floats away.

The set is done before he even realizes it was coming to an end. Amir lifts his hands from the piano, dazed, sweaty, and looks around. Zack and Kylie appear and pull him to his feet, wrapping their arms around him, dragging him over to Hec with teeth-flashing grins. Fresnel lights and happy faces all smear together in his vision.

“Thank you!” Hec screams to the bellowing crowd, slapping Amir so hard on the back he almost knocks him over. “We’ve been Kosmonauta!”

Amir is steered backstage by someone. He lets it happen, numb, barely aware.

“Good show?” he says to whoever’s behind him.

“Oh, _dude_ ,” Zack says, giggling like a kid. “Yes. Good show.” He slaps Amir on the back, too.

Backstage, there are a ton of guys in suits and some journalists with press passes filing into the backstage area. Hec leads out ahead, politely brushing off anyone who tries to talk to them, and they slip down the hallway to the green room, which is thankfully only packed with their opener band and venue staff. Everyone in here is drinking, blazing up or vaping.

“Holy shit,” Hec says quietly to Zack, who nods.

Amir kind of wants to ask what’s going on, but also kind of doesn’t. He still has that feeling, the one he had on stage, the same one he got when they were stuck in the wildfire: like he’s been lifted out of his body and is watching himself, with a time delay of a second or two.

It’s not a pleasant sensation, but it isn’t exactly upsetting, either. He feels like it’s protecting him from something, so he just glides over to the beanbag he was sitting on earlier and takes a seat.

Kylie appears at his elbow to hand him a lit joint. Amir accepts it gratefully, taking a hit.

“You’re the real deal,” she says to him.

Amir stares at the joint in his fingers. “Okay,” he says.

She laughs and strokes his hair before walking away.

Anywhere from two seconds to ten minutes goes by, and then someone squeezes his arm and pushes a cold Dasani bottle into his hand. Amir looks up. Zack.

“Drink it,” Zack says, giving him a smile before he goes off to rejoin Hec and a few other people in the corner.

Amir drinks, then sits there some more. Slowly he comes back into his body, and time catches up with itself. The world begins to lose its flat, video game quality.

Out of the swirls of people, the tall figure of Harry appears, striding toward him. Amir straightens up, chugging the rest of his water.

“Hey,” Harry says, leaning down to talk in his ear over the noise.

“Hey,” Amir says loudly back.

Now that Harry’s in the room, people keep turning to look at him while trying to pretend that they’re not turning to look at him. Hec gives him a curious once-over before making eye contact with Amir, who he smiles briefly at before turning back to Zack. Guys in suits are meandering into the room in Harry’s wake, trying to look nonchalant about it.

“Thanks for coming,” Amir says.

“‘Course.” Harry squeezes his shoulder. “Listen, I actually need to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“About tonight,” Harry says. He sounds confused by his confusion.

Amir stares at him. Processing words feels like mixing taffy, all heavy and sticky. “What about tonight?”

Harry doesn’t respond; he’s looking at the joint in Amir’s hand. Amir offers it to him, and Harry laughs, shaking his head, then plucks it from his fingers and sets it in an ashtray on the table.

One of the suits has begun to approach, like a shark cutting through the water. Harry pulls Amir to his feet and wraps an arm around his shoulders, much more snugly than he normally would.

“Hullo, Rich,” he says.

“Hi, Harry,” Rich says, his voice greasy. “Great to see you. And this is…?”

“This is my stepson, Amir,” Harry says. “Amir, this is Rich Severin, vice president of A&R for Capitol Records.”

“Great performance tonight, Amir,” Rich says, and shakes his hand, slipping a business card into his palm as he does. “You were just filling in, correct?”

“Yeah,” Amir says. “It was a favor to the band, my dad manages them...”

“Ah-ha. So you’re not signed to their label, then? You’re not under Sony?”

“No,” Amir says. “I’m not under anybody, I’m not signed.”

The grin widens. “Fantastic.”

Amir sticks the card into his back jeans pocket as Harry says, “Listen, Rich, you know I know where to reach you… I’d like to introduce Amir to a few more people, while we’ve got the chance.”

Amir has never heard this brisk, clipped voice coming out of Harry before. It’s like he’s suddenly a different person.

Rich smiles without engaging his eyes. “Of course. But please do give me a call. I’d love to sit down with you both.”

He reaches up to clap Harry on the shoulder and then strides away, heading back toward the main part of backstage.

“Okay, people saw that,” Harry mutters to him. “So get ready.”

“What —“

“You don’t have to do anything. Just smile, and only answer direct questions. I’ll do most of the talking.” Harry’s grip on him becomes vice-like. “And do _not_ walk away from me, alright? Don’t get caught alone by anyone back here, don’t let anyone corner you. And, erm… maybe take your wedding band off.”

“Take my what?”

“Take it off and give it to me. Don’t worry, it’s safe with me, I’ve got a pocket with a zip.”

Amir reluctantly obliges, but asks, “Harry, what the fuck is going on?”

Harry doesn’t have time to answer before another suit walks up. And then it goes on and on like that — Atlantic Records. Hollywood. Republic. Labels he’s never even heard of. They each sweet talk Amir and palm him a card, Harry gently rebuffs them, then they walk away grinning as if they didn’t just get rebuffed.

“What the fuck is going on,” Amir demands again when the crowd has thinned a little and Harry has started dragging him over to the refreshments table. “Why am I meeting ten thousand people?”

Harry looks down at him in curiosity. “You really don’t know, do you?”

“No?”

“You had your moment up there,” Harry says. “Everyone saw it.”

His head spins. His _moment_? What moment?

“But why are all these guys even here?” Amir says, desperately trying to cling to something that makes sense.

“They’re looking for the next big thing,” Harry says. He squeezes him. “There was already press here tonight, and I might have texted a few reporters, plus a few friends at labels, and tipped ‘em off to send a bloke down.”

“You —?”

“Harry,” a voice calls.

The voice belongs to a middle-aged guy standing next to the table, holding some strawberries in a napkin. Harry drops his arm from Amir to wrap the guy up in a hug and clap him on the back. Amir stands there, baffled.

Harry turns back to him, snatching a beer off of the table and handing it to him. “Amir, this is Jeff Azoff. I’m sure you two have met in passing.”

“Probably, but I don’t remember,” he says, extending his hand, which Jeff shakes. “Nice to meet you.”

“Appreciate the honesty,” Jeff says. “So, that was a hell of a performance tonight.”

“I’m starting to get that impression.”

“He has no idea,” Harry whispers to Jeff, shaking his head.

Jeff chuckles. “Do you know who I am?” he says to Amir. “Besides the name?”

“Yeah,” Amir says. “You’re big shit. Your dad was bigger shit, but you’re still pretty big shit.”

“Fair,” Jeff says. “Do you have a manager?”

“Yeah. My dad.”

As Amir says it, he’s overly aware of how childish and unsophisticated it sounds out loud, and his cheeks heat up. But at the same time he feels such a powerful loyalty toward his dad that he’s angry at himself for being embarrassed. He takes a sip of his beer to alleviate this.

“Louis,” Harry translates.

“Yeah,” Jeff says, “that's what I thought. Is he trying to sign you with anyone?”

“Not yet.”

“Smart to wait,” Jeff says. “But your stock just went way up tonight. If you’re going to sign a contract, soon would be the time to do it.”

Amir’s head starts spinning again. He wants to beg everyone, _wait, no, stop. Just hold on a second, please._

“He doesn’t like you,” he blurts out. “My dad, I mean.”

Jeff smiles an empty kind of smile. “With all due respect to Louis, he doesn’t really know me. I’d be happy to sit down with him and re-introduce myself.”

Amir stares at him, trying to figure out what he wants.

“If you want to talk,” Jeff says, reaching his hand out, “give me a call. I’m happy to advise, as a favor to Harry. No strings attached.”

Amir shakes his hand again. Another business card.

He looks over at Harry, who’s smiling.

*

Harry drives him back to Beverly Hills. Amir stares out the window the whole drive, looking in the side mirror at the black Suburban that trails them by a few car lengths as they drive. Harry’s security. It’s kind of sad that he always has to have security.

Even though it’s almost nine, the sun isn’t quite down yet. The sky is flooded with ambers and dark blues.

Amir texts Evan, _show was crazy. i’ll tell you more later_

 _i heard you killed it, i’ve been seeing stuff on twitter,_ Evan says. _i’m waiting for dinner to end so i can get my parents alone before i tell them… but i’ll let you know how that goes_

_sounds good. gl and stay strapped_

_Lmao. okay hubby,_ Evan replies.

_Lol fuck off_

_Okay wifey_

_fuck offfffff_

“Heads up,” Harry says, breaking the silence in the car. “Your dad is gonna be upset with me.”

Amir looks over at him. “Is he? Why?”

Harry clears his throat. His eyes are unreadable, hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. “It’s a bit complicated. But he’s going to have already heard what went on backstage.”

“Why’s that bad?”

“It’s not. But he’s gonna be upset all the same.”

“About me meeting Jeff?”

“About everything. I’m going to have a chat with him, but just be prepared.”

Amir feels like a literal baby, he’s so far out of his element. “Is he gonna be mad at _me_?”

Harry smiles at him. “No. Definitely not.”

Amir’s watch is keyed to the house, so he swipes them in. He’s excited to tell Louis about the show, about how well he played, but when they find Louis in the living room, he’s vibrating with some repressed emotion. His jaw is tight under his little beard.

“Hi, love,” he rasps to Amir, getting up from the couch to go over and bring him in for a hug. His voice is weak and rough, and Amir feels a lurch of anxiety about how fragile he seems. “Fantastic job tonight, I keep hearing you were wonderful. Only sorry I missed it.”

“It’s okay.”

“Listen — could you go on upstairs and give me and Harry a mo?”

Amir glances between them. Harry inclines his head and gives him the briefest ghost of a smile, so he heads up the stairs, but then he stops at the top and ducks behind the wall so he can eavesdrop.

Even from upstairs, he can very clearly hear Louis seethe, “What d’you think you’re doing?” in the living room.

Harry sighs. “Can I explain?”

“Explain what? I’m at a fuckin’ charity event, I’m trying to be lighthearted and funny for sick kids, and the whole time my phone’s blowing up with people telling me that my ex’s husband is backstage at the Troubadour pimping my fucking son out to the highest bidder —“

“It wasn’t like that —“

“— and greasing him up to throw him to the fucking Azoffs! Making him take his _wedding band_ off?”

Amir rubs his thumb against his bare ring finger. He forgot to get that back from Harry.

“Who told you about that part?”

“You were doing all this shit right in front of a band I manage! One that’s ‘ad mutual loyalty with me for five years, of course they told me!”

“Can we go talk downstairs?” Harry says calmly.

“I get it,” Louis says, “you’ve been frustrated, lately, ‘cos you put your career on hold for Zayn, I get it. You want to live vicariously through somebody, huh? That’s the thing about us getting close again, _Harry_ , is I actually know what’s goin’ on in that opaque fuckin’ ‘ead of yours, so I get why you’re doing what you’re doing!”

“What is it that I’m doing?” Harry says, carefully enunciating every word like he’s swearing.

“You’re swooping in on my son ‘cos you’ve just fucking realized how special he is!”

“I’ve known how special he is.”

“No, not like you did tonight,” Louis says. “You had a feeling, sure, but now you know for sure, don’t you? That he’s got _it_?”

Harry is quiet.

“Yeah. Don’t even answer, I can see it on your face. So now every flack you know’s sent in their fuckin’ clown brigade so they can trick my child into signing some shit contract that forces him to, what, crank out music he doesn’t even like for five years, and make music videos, and tour non-stop?”

“You’re getting so, so far ahead of yourself. Can we go downstairs, please? I’m sure he can hear us, unless that was your intention, to poison him against taking any advice from me?”

“I’m his dad!” Louis screams. “You’re overstepping!”

“Is it possible you’re being overly protective of him because he’s just eloped?”

Much more quietly, so quiet that Amir has to nearly lean around the corner to hear it, Louis retorts: “Know what? I'm quite within my rights to be worried about my overworked, burned-out son, who’s possibly got bipolar disorder, and who just made a massive life-altering decision out of nowhere.”

His laryngitic voice could peel paint from the walls — it’s a hiss, raspy and brittle. Amir presses himself against the wall, his heart quickening with anxiety. It never occurred to him that getting married suddenly could be a bipolar thing. The decision felt rational to him at the time, still does, but now he’s thinking of Zayn, and the rationally irrational decisions he’s made. Isn’t that how it goes, when you’re manic? You’re convinced everything is great while the people around you are helpless to watch you in crisis?

Does Zayn ever lose time and feel like life is a video game? Amir’s never asked him.

Harry and Louis’ footsteps sound on the hardwood floor, and their voices start up again but begin to fade in volume. Amir creeps down the stairs, peeking around the corner — they’re heading for the door to the basement. He waits for them to descend and then sneaks after them down the first couple of steps, then sits down and leans against the banister, out of sight. He can’t see them, but the cellar has great acoustics, so he doesn’t have to go any further than that to hear them clearly.

“I really thought we were past all this,” Harry’s saying. “This resentment about my solo career, about me marrying Zayn —“

“So, what — you slap me silly in a hotel room, and then that’s me sorted, then you can fuck me about however you like and I can’t say anything?” Louis snaps. “Yeah, not likely. You can’t instruct people on how to feel about you, you do realize that, right?”

“It’s my eternal struggle,” Harry says lightly, and Louis lets out a strangled-sounding laugh. “Look… did it ever occur to you that I’m trying to help you? You’re just coming off of a tour, you’ll probably want to get back to writing. You’re still managing several bands. One Direction is overdue for some new music. Why would you want to take on managing Amir, too? Why not put him in the best hands you can and just let it be?”

“‘Cos he’s my little boy,” Louis says. “He’s — I don’t think you get it. I know he puts up a front, but you do know how sensitive he is. And shy. They’d eat him alive if they got the chance, and I don’t want him torn apart like Zayn was, I couldn’t stand it.”

“I get it,” Harry says in his low voice. “And to that point… part of you’s afraid they’ll steal him from you, right? Turn him against you, like they did with Zayn? Everyone’s Shahid?”

“No, I — that’s not —“ Louis stutters himself into silence.

“Afraid they’ll convince him you’re small-time and pathetic, and you shouldn’t have a say in his career?”

“Fuck off! That’s not on!”

“No, but it is what you think. I know you as well as you know me. But Louis, I promise that would never happen.”

“I have to protect him,” Louis says raggedly. “Don’t you get that?”

“You really think I wouldn’t protect him?”

“D’you really think it’s the same? Did you carry him in your body for nine months? Did you sing him to sleep every night and hold ‘im when he was scared? What if this was reversed, what if I was pimpin’ out one of your daughters?”

“I wasn’t _pimping_ anyone out. He was really incredible tonight, you know. I was proud of him, as his stepdad. I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity we had there — I called those execs there specifically so they could meet him, so, what, after he wows everyone, I’m going to tell them, no, actually, never mind?”

“You could have. You knew what it was going to turn into. You could’ve put them off and taken him home, instead of starting a feeding frenzy.”

“Fine, maybe, yeah, I wanted to show him off a bit… sue me.”

“Right, that’s another thing.”

“What is?”

“It’s not lost on me that my son’s the only one out of all our kids that’s shown serious musical aptitude and a drive to really pursue it.”

“Well,” Harry says, sounding strained. “I, ah. The girls are only eleven, so we don’t quite know yet. Toni plays the guitar.”

“No, I know, but she’s not so serious about it, is she? I thought it was just something she likes to do for fun.”

“She could always _get_ serious,” Harry says defensively. “At some point. She likes to write, she fills up whole notebooks, she might be writing songs. I mean, I dunno for sure, ‘cos she won’t let me read any of it, but…”

“Maybe she’s writing her memoirs, like her dad,” Louis jokes, and Harry laughs.

“Maybe. I dunno. Neither of them tell me things like that, they usually tell Zayn. He’s, y’know, the confidant.” After saying this, Harry clears his throat in a way that makes it obvious he doesn’t want to discuss it further.

“Look, I love your girls, I do,” Louis says. “I think they’re wonderful. But Amir’s, like… he won his division at the Lizst competition at eleven years old —“

“Louis, I — yeah, I get what you’re saying. He’s our only prodigy. He might turn out to be our only dedicated musician — alright, fine! That doesn’t mean I’m trying to kidnap him.”

“I never said that. But you realize I am his manager, right? Never signed a contract wiv ‘im, but for all intents and purposes, I am managing his career. You should’ve run this by me, instead of just lettin’ me hear about it secondhand.”

“I’ll admit, in the moment, I might have gotten a bit overexcited... But it’s exciting! It is. And, honestly, would you be as upset if it were Zayn seizing on this situation to try and bring him along in his career?”

“Zayn is his father,” Louis says acidly.

“I know, but Zayn’s never going to do this,” Harry says. “I know he’s been involved with Amir as a musician and singer, like, as far as his actual craft and talent go, but he’s not going to put in the career development work. He can barely stand the industry anymore. He’s burned plenty of bridges, as we both know. For better or worse, that's just not his personality, to gladhand people and kiss arse and network. He gets by on his talent and my goodwill.”

“So?”

“So let me act in his place, then! Listen, Louis, I know deep down you’re aware that I respect you… so please don’t pretend I mean this as an insult to you. But I just have the bigger Rolodex.”

Amir wonders what the fuck a Rolodex is.

“I know everyone. I’m connected to every industry in Hollywood. I’ve got Full Stop wrapped around my little finger, they’d do anything for me. I have endless favors to cash in. And you’re right, I’m not working right now, yeah. So, I’d love to take this time to develop your son.”

Louis is quiet for a while, so quiet that Amir wonders if he’s even still in the room. Finally he says, in a small voice, “I want him happy and doing exactly what he loves. I don’t want him sold to the highest bidder.”

“I know. I don’t either.”

“Don’t you? Making him take his wedding ring off was a nasty piece of work, y’know.”

“I promise I didn’t mean it the way it probably came across. I just didn’t want him having to answer any awkward questions.”

“Don’t lie to me,” Louis snaps. “Don’t you dare lie to me, I can always tell.”

There’s a pregnant pause, and then Harry admits, “Alright, fine. I didn’t want anyone to twig. It makes him less marketable, you know that as well as I do.”

Amir reels. This entire time, he’s sort of been thinking Louis is overreacting, but the way Harry says this is so nakedly reptilian, so devoid of stepfatherly affection, that Amir can hardly believe it came out of him. Harry? Kind, avuncular Harry?

As if Harry immediately realized how bad this sounded, he rushes to add, “You know I love him.”

“He isn’t you,” Louis says flatly. “He isn’t like you. He can’t do what you did, it would make him miserable.”

“I, erm… I defer to you, on that.”

“Rightfully fucking so.”

They’re quiet for a moment.

“So,” Harry says, a bit awkwardly. “We haven’t had the chance to talk about your tour, do you want to —”

“Not really!”

“No?” Harry’s voice sounds like he’s moving around the room, then sitting.

“No! I’m still mardy with you.”

“I know,” Harry says rather pitifully. “I don’t like it. We’ve been doing so well, lately...”

“Well, tough.” Amir hears the door to the minifridge opening. “Look, you’ve got me stress eating, now.”

“Can I have a water while you’re over there?” Harry says.

There’s the sound of a water bottle being very unceremoniously tossed at a soft surface.

“Thanks... you know, you could probably stand to stress eat, a bit. You look thin.”

“I didn’t take care of myself well on tour,” Louis mutters. “It was a lot to handle. Hadn’t ever done it myself before.”

“Yeah, it’s rough.”

“Never seemed to get to you, much.”

“Well, I was doing a lot of cocaine at the time.”

Louis laughs.

“I really do hate that you’re angry with me,” Harry says. “I knew you would be, but I didn’t think it’d be that bad.”

“You don’t reckon this is a bit of a sore spot for me, mate? You, Mr Big Celebrity, stealing away with me kids off to Hollywood? Puttin’ stars in their eyes and making them forget their little old dad?”

“That honestly never occurred to me,” Harry says. “I mean, your kids adore you. You do know that, don’t you? I felt like such a stupid prick the first year or so after Zayn and I got back together, ‘cos half the things I did for them, one of them’d pipe up at me like _that’s not how Louis does that_. And they’d talk about you all the time, and talk about you to Zayn, and remind him of your relationship… I know it’s typical child of divorce stuff, I used to do it myself, but God did they manage to make me feel inadequate sometimes.” He laughs. “Took me so long to convince them I just wanted to be a fun stepdad with a big closet for them to play dress-up in, not a Louis replacement. ‘Cos I never would’ve measured up, in their eyes.”

“That’s nice of you to say,” Louis murmurs.

“It’s just the truth.”

Louis is quiet for a moment, then yells, “AMIR?”

“Isn’t he all the way upstairs?” Harry says.

“Nah. Give you two to one odds he’s been eavesdropping this entire time.”

Amir knows he’s caught then, because if he sneaks away, Louis will just ask him later, and he really is a human lie detector.

“Well,” he says, getting up and descending the stairs, “you’ve been talking about _me_ …”

He turns the corner and sees Harry and Louis sitting on the white couch in the middle of the room, sharing a thing of hummus and a bag of pretzels that are sitting on the coffee table.

“See?” Louis says, and nudges a shocked-looking Harry in the arm. “What’d I tell you?”

“Alright, I am genuinely surprised,” Harry says.

Louis grins. “What, your girls don’t eavesdrop?”

“I mean, not that I’m aware...”

“They probably do, then.”

“Are you pissed?” Amir says to his dad.

“No,” Louis says, gesturing to a chair that sits diagonal from the couch. “C’mere, sit down. Let’s discuss your career.”

“Oh, that was so Simon of you,” Harry says. Louis laughs and makes a face.

Amir takes a seat, pulling off his boots and setting them next to him on the carpet. “Are you guys gonna get in another fistfight?”

“No!” Louis exclaims. “Not at all. No, we’re fine, I promise.”

“What all did you overhear?” Harry says.

“Um,” Amir says. “I mean, basically everything. But I wanted to know, like... is Evan really gonna be a problem?”

Harry nods while Louis shakes his head. Louis notices this, and shoots a look at Harry.

“It depends,” Harry amends. “But the thing is — okay, how honest do you want me to be here? Scale of one to ten.”

“Ten,” Amir says. “Duh.”

“The thing is, you’re good-looking, and you’ve got loads of charisma,” Harry says. “Really, the charisma is more important. There are dead gorgeous people out there who are limp noodles, they wouldn’t catch our eye if they walked in the room right now, but you’ve got, y’know — a certain quality.”

“A certain quality,” Amir repeats.

“Yes. And no one is going to not have noticed it. No one who saw you play tonight was oblivious to that fact. And that is, I’m not going to lie to you, a significant part of what brought those label guys up from the audience to come woo you — more than your technical skill.”

Amir doesn’t know how he feels about this. He’s flattered and disappointed all at once.

Harry gives a sidelong glance to Louis, who shrugs at him, like, _go on._ He clears his throat and continues, “Part of a label’s job, as far as marketing you to a mainstream audience, is going to be convincing the general public that there’s a chance that you could fall in love with them, or — slightly more realistic — that they could sleep with you. Of course they can’t do either, in reality, unless they get very lucky.”

“Speak for yourself,” Louis says. “Never f — I never slept with our fans.”

“Hmm,” Harry says, disbelievingly. “Anyway, that’s the mythology you’re expected to craft, right? Unless it’s a sort of Stevie and Lindsey sort of thing from the outset, where you present this very compelling and dramatic relationship between two musicians, one that usually goes up in flames...”

“Or _down_ in flames,” Louis says, with a look of mischief.

Harry ignores this.

“So what am I supposed to do?” Amir says, exasperated. “Like, pretend I’m not married and go fuck random fans so I still count as hot?”

“Absolutely not,” Louis says, clearly horrified. “No, no one’s saying that.”

“You’re not telling them they can actually, literally sleep with you,” Harry says. “Again, you’re selling them a fantasy.”

“But _how_?” Amir says.

“Music videos, and things like that.”

“That isn’t really an answer?”

“You’re lucky, really,” Harry says. “It isn’t like it used to be, being an omega man. It used to be really, erm, not great. I was able to get away with hiding it for a long time… unfortunately, your dad wasn’t.”

“Yeah, really wish you wouldn’t’ve hid that,” Louis says testily. 

Harry grimaces. “I know.”

“Created a bit of a mess.”

“Well, my point is that Amir doesn’t have to, and it can actually be to his advantage to play up a bit of androgyny.”

“What mess?” Amir asks curiously of Louis. “Are you talking about Larry?”

“Among other things,” Louis says.

“Look, when it comes to Evan, I just think you’d have to play it carefully,” Harry says, clearly wanting to zip right past this. “If you want to make a deal soon, it’s best to delay the elopement story getting out for as long as possible. Obviously, people saw you performing with a wedding band on, but you were wearing several other rings, too… so I think we can slide on that, if you want to, with radio silence. It’ll hit the press at some point, ‘cos you’re already a public figure by virtue of your family, and so is Evan to some extent. But we can control when that happens by agreeing to leak some exclusive info to the major tabloids in exchange for them withholding it.”

Amir’s head is spinning again. “Leak — leak what?”

“Like who you’re signing with, or details about the wedding,” Harry says. “Or we lie to them, even. Give them something fake and let them sort it out on their end.”

“You can do that? Lie?”

“There’s also the catch and kill option. I have a catch and kill agreement with TMZ, I could extend it to cover you, here.”

Louis sighs. “Amir,” he says, “what do you want, love? D’you want to go to the negotiating table with these big labels, right now, while you’ve got the upper hand? Do you want to try to trigger a bidding war? What d’you want?”

Amir tries to hang on to his carefully laid plans and ideas, but they’re slipping away like water through his fingers, and he feels incredibly childish for all of the preconceived notions he had about how this would go.

“I just want to make jazz,” he says, sort of desperately. “I dunno.”

“You don’t want to try to start out more mainstream, more jazz-influenced?” Harry says. “Any label could hook you up with some excellent writers, you wouldn’t even have to write. You could honestly carve out your own genre if you got the right people. And I could help you with that.”

This sounds deliciously tempting, although Amir knows carving out his own genre would be ten thousand times harder than Harry’s breezy tone is attempting to make it sound. In fact, the enormity of that is so absolutely staggering that it knocks his breath away.

This is what he’s been working toward, right? But that’s the problem. He’s been working so hard for so long, and now it’s all coming together, and he’s finding himself exhausted and overwhelmed. All he wants is to run away with Evan and have a chance to breathe. He doesn’t want his phone blowing up with Twitter notifications and texts and emails like is right now. He doesn’t want to shake hands with any more dead-eyed old guys.

This is his dream. How could he work so hard and get so far, only for his dream to suddenly feel insurmountable?

Louis flicks his gaze over at Harry sort of despairingly, like he’s watching this whole thing spiral out of his control. Amir knows how he feels.

“I don’t know if I want that,” Amir says. “It feels like I’d be betraying everything I’ve ever learned.”

“No, no,” Harry says. “Look, the Beatles made interesting music. They worked with incredibly innovative people. It wasn’t cookie cutter, it just feels cookie cutter now because they essentially created modern pop music. Same with the Beach Boys.”

“Those aren’t my idols, though. My idols are guys like Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington.”

“So? You’re saying Charlie Parker never sold a record?”

“Uh, not like the fucking _Beatles_ did,” Amir says.

Louis laughs under his breath.

Harry grins. “What about Lizzo? She’s classically trained, she plays a classical instrument in live performances, but she’s still pop.”

“I’m _Lizzo_ now? She had like one in two million luck.”

“What I’m saying is, you have to start somewhere. Why not compromise now to buy freedom down the road?”

“There’s a difference between compromising and capitulating. Any music I make, I want to have the freedom to improvise. I can’t do that if I have twenty writers in the room with me.”

“Sure you can. You can improvise piano solos, like you did tonight.”

“They’d cut it,” Amir says. “I know how big labels are. If I took a big deal… they’d want their money’s worth, they wouldn’t risk anything that’s too unusual.”

“You can improvise live,” Harry says. His eyes bore into Amir’s like two laser-guided missiles. “That’s what live performances are for. You did that tonight.”

“Harry,” Louis whispers.

“I don’t want to sell out,” Amir says.

“D’you think I’m a sell-out?” Harry asks — impassively, like it doesn’t even matter if Amir does.

Amir hesitates. “I think you’re only a sell-out if you personally feel like you’ve sold out,” he says. “It’s about integrity, it’s not about the kind of music you’re making. I don’t think pop is selling out if you really love making pop. But that’s not who I am.”

“What are your wildest dreams, though?” Harry asks him, like he’s a genie and Amir just rubbed his lamp. “What’s your craziest fantasy for your career?”

Amir stares at him. “A Grammy,” he says. “A number one album.”

“Okay,” Harry says, all eerie calm. “How bad do you want it?”

Fear trickles down his spine. “I dunno.”

“Are you willing to compromise?”

Amir looks to Louis, then. “Dad?”

Louis is biting at his bottom lip, looking pained. “I can’t tell you what you want,” he says with regret.

“Can’t you, though?” Amir says, and they all laugh.

“You have said you wanted your first album to be sort of mainstream, radio-friendly,” Louis says.

“But mainstream _jazz_ ,” Amir counters.

Harry steeples his hands and lays them on his thigh, looking like he’s weighing his words before he gently says, “That doesn’t exist anymore.”

“I could try and bring it back!”

“Amir,” Louis says, just as gently, “I think the time’s come where you sort of have to decide who your audience actually is. You know I love what you do and I’d support you in whatever… if you want to do the most crazy, experimental jazz on Earth, then we will get you through the doors and shaking the hands of whatever people can help you create that, or whatever combo you need to be in. But if you want to perform to crowds like you did tonight, you might have to diversify. Not saying go pop, but.”

“People love saxophone,” Harry says. “That’s one thing that’s stayed constant, even in pop, people love that.”

“I don’t play the sax,” Amir says, baffled.

“No, I just mean as an accompaniment. Keep you on the jazz spectrum.”

Amir blows a breath of air out, hard. This is the first time that Harry, who he’s always admired and fawned over, has sounded out of touch and weirdly corporate to him. He doesn’t like it at all. “That’s not really what jazz is,” he says. “Look, I’m not afraid of the radio, or anything, I’m not afraid of popularity. It just feels like these days, pop is about coming to your audience, not about letting your audience come to you, which makes it really fleeting. I want to leave a mark.”

Harry nods. “We all want that.”

“Listen,” Louis says, putting a hand up. “Why don’t we take a day or two, alright? Make a pro-con list? I’ll make some calls, see what the extent of the damage that Harry’s done is…”

Harry looks offended. “Damage?”

“Proverbial damage.”

Amir nods. “Can I have my ring back?” he says. He misses Evan, and he’s worried about him, and his finger feels weirdly bare.

“Oh, right, sorry,” Harry says apologetically. He fishes the band out of his pocket and hands it to Louis, who leans forward to pass it to Amir.

Amir slips it onto his finger as soon as he has it back, holding his one hand anxiously in the other, rubbing his pinky against the ring itself.

“He’s telling his parents tonight,” he mutters. “He’s trying to get them alone, away from all the crazy shit going down.”

Louis inhales. “Ohh,” he says. “Poor lad.”

Amir nods, then looks up at them.

“Well,” Harry says, clapping his hands to his thighs and looking like he’s about to stand. “I’m gonna head out, probably… I’ve left Zayn alone with the girls, and he’s sick…”

“Wait, no, stay for a little bit,” Amir begs him. “Let’s all just, like, have a beer and talk about less serious shit. Harry, you can tell Dad about the show, okay? ‘Cos I dunno what it looked like from the audience.”

“Beer and a recap sound lovely,” Louis says.

Harry smiles. “If you two really want me,” he says.

“We said we did, didn’t we?” Louis says impatiently. “Amir, fetch us some beers.”

MALIBU, AUGUST 13, 2039

When Harry gets in, the nanny is with the girls and the dog in the sitting room, watching TV with them. He stops as he passes by and waits for them to notice his presence, but all three of them are engrossed in whatever show they’re watching, which sounds like a drama from what he can hear of the background score. After a moment, Harry clears his throat and sings softly, “Hi Toni Anne, hi Lena Vittoria.”

His daughters look up and chorus “hi Dad” from the couch. Kip thumps his tail.

“Zayn’s asleep,” Blair says to him. “He called me over so he could get some rest.”

“Thanks, Blair,” Harry says.

“Do we have to go to bed soon?” Toni says. “It’s almost ten.”

“Do you _want_ to go to bed?” Harry says mildly.

“No, but we have camp early tomorrow,” Marlena says.

“Daddy would make us go to bed,” Toni says.

“Hmm,” Harry says. “Well, he’s sick, so take a reprieve.”

The girls cheer.

“And if you end up sleep-deprived, that’ll teach you a valuable lesson about decision-making,” he adds.

Harry heads upstairs and peeks his head in the master bedroom — just to check on Zayn, not wanting to wake him up, but he stirs at the shaft of light that falls across the bed.

“Sorry,” Harry whispers. “Go back to sleep.”

“No, no,” Zayn says. His voice is nearly gone. “C’mere. Tell me how it went.”

“Oh, Zayn,” Harry says, fluttering into the room and tossing himself onto the bed, crawling up next to his husband in the dark and pressing a kiss to his cheek. “Oh, you’ve got no idea. He was brilliant, I got goosebumps. And it wasn’t just me. He brought the place down.”

“Really?” Zayn says, a smile cracking his face. “Just on piano, like?”

“He was singing, too, and he sounded fantastic, but oh yeah. Marvelous on piano. Not even a piano, it was a keyboard. But it was something else, I dunno.” Harry tries to stop himself being so breathless and gushy. “It was just one of those great nights you get as a performer, y’know, when you manage to get the whole audience behind you. He shined.”

Zayn, looking crestfallen, reaches up and strokes a knuckle against Harry’s face. “Shit… and I missed it.”

“No, you couldn’t’ve known. I didn’t. I did think he might do well, though, which is why, um — well, first off, Louis was fairly mardy with me tonight. I called a load of label people and some press to come down and watch. Including Jeff. I just wanted them to see him! I didn’t realize his performance was gonna be, y’know, what it was. So backstage was a bit of a label gangbang. I made sure to keep it brief each time, but I can understand, y’know, Louis was hearing about it secondhand —“

Zayn presses two fingers to his lips. “I’ve never heard you talk this fast in my life,” he drawls, and Harry laughs.

“He thinks I’m trying to steal his baby,” Harry says.

“Are ya?”

“No!”

“Well,” Zayn says, as if this settles things. “There you go.”

“Amir wouldn’t let me steal him even if I wanted to,” Harry mutters. “Told Jeff to his face that Louis doesn’t like him. ‘My _dad’s_ my manager, and he doesn’t like you.’ Very cheeky, you would’ve been proud.”

Zayn is smiling. “I am proud,” he says hoarsely.

“Anyway, I’ll let you go back to sleep. I recorded the show a bit on my phone, though, if you want to watch. It doesn’t really capture the, y’know… the energy of it all… but you can hear him pretty well.”

“He sound like me?”

“Huh?”

“He sound like me, when ‘e sang?”

“Yeah, he did,” Harry says. “He’s got a lot of talent. He sounded more raw, less polished, but in a good way.”

“Good,” Zayn says, sounding like he might be drifting back off.

Harry pets his hair and rolls over onto his back. “I’ll lie here with you. We can watch the video tomorrow.”

“Thanks for going tonight,” Zayn mumbles.

“Of course,” Harry says.


	6. amir and evan part iii

MALIBU, AUGUST 14, 2039

Harry ends up staying up until 3 a.m. scouring social media for mentions of Amir and sending out emails to his connections and friends in every aspect of the star-making business, all while Zayn snoozes catlike beside him. So Harry isn’t too surprised when he wakes up at 11:04 the next morning, and he’s alone in bed with this series of texts on his phone from Zayn:

 _You fell asleep with your fuckin laptop on your chest lol x_ (Attachment: 1 Image)

_if you wake up before i get back, i took the girls to camp_

_ok you’re still not up im going to our tea place to get something for my throat_

_Back from coffee you’re still not up. You dead? I left a cup of your ozone shit on the table, Im having TS over for a chat so don’t come downstairs with your willy out or anything… unless it’s on purpose ;)_

Taylor? Harry wonders if he’s talking to her about Amir. Would he do that, though? It would be such a shady move.

There is the fact that she’s extremely connected; even better connected than Harry is, at least in the music world. Maybe this is Zayn’s passive-aggressive way of wresting back control of this somewhat runaway train situation.

Is it possible that Harry made both Louis _and_ Zayn feel threatened when he acted so decisively last night? Especially right now, when they’re both worried about Amir for other reasons? Shit. Harry kicks himself; he’s usually so much better at biding his time and crafting his moment. He just got so excited, he let the night run away with him, and now he looks like a Svengali.

Amir _needs_ him, though, is the thing. He needs a Svengali, if he’s going to be all that he can be. And Harry, though he loves his stepson, isn’t blinded by the kind of filial fixations that Zayn and Louis are. He sees Amir as his own person, a budding musician in need of tutelage — not a precious, sensitive little angel son. He wants to do for Amir what Jeff did for him, twenty years ago.

Harry dresses quickly, although a little nicer than he normally would to bum around the house. He grabs the coffee before heading downstairs. It’s gotten cold, but it doesn’t taste much better when it’s hot.

He rings Louis as he heads downstairs.

“Hullo hullo,” Louis says when he picks up.

“Hi. You leaving town yet?”

“No, my flight’s later. I had a few radio interviews this morning, just leaving the second one now. Why?”

Harry hesitates. “You wanna hang out?”

Louis laughs. “Hang out?”

“Yeah. Go for a drive, grab a coffee. You busy? Where’s Amir?”

“Amir had an early call wiv our lawyers about his, ah, marriage, and then I forced him out of the house to go hang out with some of his high school pals, ‘cos he’s getting deluged on social media. In a good way, mostly, but there’s a few trolls, y’know — ‘you’re only getting attention ‘cos of who your dads are,’ that sort of thing. “

“Right.”

“He’s not used to that shit in this volume, is all. He needed a distraction.”

“Is he flying back up north with you?” Harry says.

“Depends,” Louis says. “I’d like him to feel out his options while he’s got momentum, possibly take some meetings with you like we talked about, which means staying here a few more days, if he could kip with you all. I don’t want him alone... I wouldn’t go back yet, but Liam needs my backup on a Paddy problem.”

“Paddy problem? Everything alright?”

“It’s fine,” Louis says evasively. “Just, y’know. His entrepreneurial streak, again.”

Harry doesn’t pry. “Yeah, Amir’s always welcome, the girls love to see him. And, yeah, I sort of, uh… already was scheduling some meetings for him.”

“‘Course you were.”

“Not with labels! Just with designers, and image consultants, that sort of thing. Listen, if I could get your support here, that’d be great, ‘cos I think Zayn’s feeling out his own options. He’s actually meeting with Taylor right now.”

Louis laughs. “Swift?”

“Yeah!” Harry whispers. He can hear Zayn and Taylor talking in the sitting room as he sneaks through the house in the opposite direction, toward the dining room. “In the house!”

“What, about _Amir_ , you think? Why would he meet with Taylor Swift about Amir?”

“‘Cos he doesn’t like or trust Jeff, that’s why! And I bet he wants some big player input, but he doesn’t want it from anyone he thinks is like, inside the _system_ , y’know what I mean? No agents or managers or lawyers, only other artists. He’s outmaneuvering me, it’s very clever.”

“Harold, is that really what your relationship is like? ‘Cos I think you two are a bit more functional than that.”

“We’ve got this awful, passive-aggressive communication style when it comes to work things, we always have, you know that. And we just don’t agree on the industry. Listen, you don’t have to like Jeff,” Harry says, settling down in an easy chair by the window that overlooks their pool and sipping his nasty coffee. “Or even trust him. But I think all input is valuable, at this stage.”

“So you’re mardy Zayn’s meeting with your ex, and you want me to rescue you, then turn me son over to you so you can dress him up like a dolly and hand feed him to your shark manager?”

“No! Well, yeah to the first part, no to the second. Can you just come over so we can talk about this without all the, y’know, crazy emotions of last night?”

“Yeah, I’m my way to your place right now.”

“Fantastic.”

*

Harry is alternately scrolling through his texts and emails when the front door bangs open, signaling Louis’ arrival. He goes to meet him, but as he walks by the sitting room, Zayn calls his name.

“Yeah?” Harry says, stepping up the stair and leaning around the corner of a bookcase.

Zayn and Taylor are curled up on the central big white couch that has the best view of the beach through the floor-to-ceiling windows. It’s overcast and brisk today; they’re both dressed in autumnal clothes and have cups of tea.

“Hi,” Harry says to them both, meandering toward them but stopping at the edge of a Persian rug.

“Hi,” Zayn says. His voice is a little less bad, today. “You heading out?”

“Yeah, I’m —“

“Do you people not come greet anyone at the door anymore?” Louis says from behind them. Harry turns, then smiles in amusement when he sees Louis is wearing one of his own tour sweatshirts and a beanie, and still hasn’t shaved.

Louis stops beside Harry, though a few feet away from him. “Hi all,” he says.

“What’s up?” Zayn says, looking concerned. “Problem with sonny?”

“No, I’m here to pick Harry up. But I’d like us to talk about the, er, marriage situation at some point, today.”

“I agree,” Zayn says, rubbing at his own, much neater beard. “He talk to the lawyers?”

“Aye.”

“And?”

“We can discuss it later,” Louis says pointedly.

“Saw Evan’s dad on all the papers when I got coffee,” Zayn says. “Wall Street Journal and all that. That’s his dad, right? Blonde guy, looks like he’s holding in a toot? Sounds like he’s having a rough go of it.”

Louis snorts. “Yeah, that’s him. Evan apparently still hasn’t told his parents, guess he figures they’ve got enough to be getting on with.”

Taylor looks curious, but is clearly trying to pretend she isn’t. “Hi, Louis, it’s been a while,” she says cheerfully.

“Very long while,” Louis says. “Nice to see you.”

Harry is antsy and irritated; he just wants to get outside into the fresh air. “Anyway,” he says. “We were gonna —“

“Wait, hang on,” Louis says, putting a hand up. “Just checking — are you two having some, like, evil powwow about Amir’s career, here?”

Zayn and Taylor look at each other in confusion, and Taylor sets her tea down on the coffee table.

“Uh, no, mate,” Zayn says. “Not at all.”

“‘Cos Harry thinks that’s what you’re up to. He thinks you wanted to go behind his back to figure out Amir’s next steps, so the Azoffs don’t get their hands on him, ‘cos apparently I’ve lost the plot and would just let that happen.”

“Hey,” Harry exclaims. “What are you throwing me under the bus for?”

Louis puts his hands up. “I’m just clearin’ the air.”

Zayn and Taylor are laughing, now, giggling like schoolchildren, a pair of mean alphas. Harry wants desperately to get out of here.

“No, love,” Zayn says, choking back a laugh and clearing his throat. “Nah, um, we’re talking about _my_ career. ‘Cos I didn’t tour my last album? She’s givin’ me a bit of advice, and we were talking about working together again.”

“Oh,” Harry says. “Alright.”

“Yeah, sorry, guess I’m just more self-absorbed than you think,” Zayn says. “Haven’t mentioned Amir once.”

“I did hear he was great last night, though,” Taylor pipes up. “Through the grapevine.”

“See?” Louis chirps to Harry. “All paranoia.”

“You’re a very mean little man,” Harry tells him.

He grins. “Payback.”

“Yeah, hey, why are you two even hangin’ out?” Zayn says. “I thought you said Louis was ripping you a new one last night.”

“We have a complicated relationship,” Louis says.

Taylor starts laughing again. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I’m just trying to imagine exactly what Harry thought was going on here? Like you called me up and went, ‘Quick, Taylor, I need your help cutting Harry out of my son’s life,’ and I said, ‘Oh, bet, I’ll be over in ten minutes, let’s figure this out.’”

Everyone but Harry starts laughing again.

“I wasn’t being _that_ dramatic,” Harry says.

“We-ell,” Louis says. “I did ‘ave to tell you to relax a bit.”

“Me, relax?” Harry demands. “I’m the most relaxed person in this room. My blood pressure’s ninety over sixty. I don’t need to relax.”

“Harry, Harry, c’mere,” Zayn says, reaching a hand out for him.

Harry glares at him as he comes over. Zayn takes both of his hands in his own and laces their fingers together, smiling. “Pick me up some ice cream, angel?”

“Dairy’s bad for your throat,” Harry says, feeling churlish.

Zayn winks at him. “I’ll live. Vanilla please. Taylor, you want ice cream?”

“Sure,” she says, smiling. “Does Harry remember what I like?”

“No, Harry doesn’t,” Harry says flatly.

“Strawberry’s good.”

“Are you all finished taking the piss now?” he says. “‘Cos you can only have ice cream if you’re done taking the piss.”

Zayn and Taylor exchange a mock-serious look, then nod.

*

Louis drove over in an R8 Spyder with the top down, and he zips them back out along the coast in it, their hair whipping in the wind. Harry tries to meditate a little, staring at the horizon and focusing on whatever’s thumping through the car speakers.

Two songs in, it shuffles to a track that opens with Louis’ voice. Louis quickly changes it.

“Sorry,” he says. “Hate doing that, feels like a hostage situation.”

“I quite liked the new record,” Harry offers.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Didn’t I already tell you?”

“I think you texted me congratulations, dunno if I got a verdict out of you.”

“Well, it was good. I liked it. It made me sad, in a good way.”

Louis looks pleased. “Thanks, mate.”

“And I liked the production. Sounded a bit like, ahh… like Beach Boys meets Collective Soul, via England.”

“Really? I’ll take it.”

“Had like, some melancholy California tones...”

Louis wrinkles his nose.

“I meant that in a good way!”

“No, I know, I know. Thank you. I liked your last film, by the way.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah! Me and Payno got it on On Demand.”

Harry laughs. “Did you take the piss out of me?”

“Well, we had to just a little bit,” Louis says. “But no, we liked it. I didn’t see it coming at all, that bit where the priest turns out to be your brother.”

“Uh-huh, it was a good twist.”

“You film that here in L.A.?”

“Yeah, that was the only reason I signed on for it,” Harry says. “I didn’t really have to be away from the girls at all. Was home by five every night.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah.”

They’re quiet again for a while. Harry looks over at Louis, waiting for whatever biting, confrontational comment he can tell is coming.

Louis swipes at his nose before he says, “So, you haven’t really answered this — what exactly was your thought process in inviting a load of record execs to my band’s show, to see my son, without telling me?”

There it is.

“They aren’t your band,” Harry points out.

“For the purposes of this conversation, a band I’ve managed for five years is my band.”

“Well, it’s interesting to me how you always get to set the goal posts wherever you like and then yell at me about how evil I am for violating them.”

Louis snorts and doesn’t respond.

“I admitted last night that I got a bit ahead of myself,” Harry says. “But I couldn’t reach you, you were busy —“

“You didn’t try,” Louis cuts him off. “I didn’t have a single missed call or text from you. Half of why I was so angry.”

“Well,” Harry says again. “I dunno. I didn’t want to bother you.”

Louis jerks the steering wheel so abruptly as they go around a curve that Harry reaches out and puts a hand on the crook of his elbow. They’re driving right along the coast now, with nothing but cliff on the other side of the guardrail.

“Sorry,” Louis says apologetically, slowing down. “Not used to how this handles, I just got it.”

“Yeah, I guess I was afraid if I led with it, you’d tell me off,” Harry admits. “And I thought Zayn might tell me he wasn’t ready for that. I just had a feeling he’s at a point in his development as an artist that we ought to get the right people paying attention to him whenever we can. I’ve been keeping an eye on his career, too. I _am_ his stepfather, alright? Have been for more than a decade. I don’t know why you’re acting like me being interested in his career is so grotesque.”

“Because you’ve made it about his career, and not _him_!” Louis explodes. “You _know_ Amir! You knew the way you handled that was gonna be overwhelming and confusing for him! You know he’s going through something right now! You know all that! But you didn’t care, you were so eager to toss him in the shark tank! Now he’s got this massive choice to make, and he has to move quickly, when I’ve been cautioning him to be careful!”

“Life goes on,” Harry says acidly. “You don’t put your entire future on hold because of your personal life.”

Louis’ eyes harden. Harry winces and closes his own self-protectively.

“That wasn’t about you that wasn’t about you _thatwasn’taboutyouuuuu_ ,” he quickly adds.

“Oh?” Louis scoffs. “Who was it about, then?”

“It was just a general comment!”

They inch to a crawl as traffic backs up on the PCH. Louis plants his foot on the brake and looks over at Harry with a sort of long-suffering expression that makes him feel like a bastard.

“You know, you’re the only one who didn’t get a bit of a raw deal out of that band, representation-wise,” Louis says. “You were the pampered favorite son, you got to do whatever you wanted, so you don’t _get_ what a jungle it is! You properly don’t. After the band, you waltzed away, and you’ve been living in dreamland ever since. You think Amir is gonna be able to do that? It’s his first deal. Who on earth ever got a good first deal, no matter how talented and connected they were? Even your pal Taylor got an awful first deal. That’s how it is for us normals.”

“So would you rather that no one saw him last night? I don’t believe that.”

Louis shrugs. “You think if he’s really that good, he’ll never have a night like that again?”

“It was lightning in a bottle,” Harry says. “If I were him, and I could pick a night for labels and press to see me perform, it would be a night exactly like that.”

“Maybe I just have more faith in him than you do.”

Traffic starts moving again. The lashing, angry ocean on their right, with the heavy gray sky over it, starts feeling like it’s an extension of the energy between them.

“In that case, what were you waiting for?” Harry says.

“More bona fides,” Louis responds immediately. “More on his resume. More collaborations. More performances. More credits. More press. More experience, and self-confidence, and comfort with himself as a musician. I didn’t want him to have to come to the table for another year, at least.”

Harry sits in silence, unable to think of a response.

“I had a _plan_ ,” Louis says with difficulty. “And that didn’t occur to you. You just waltzed in and took over.”

“Louis, I’m sorry. You know I’m very proud of him.”

“I do.”

“I want the best for him, I swear.”

Louis sighs. His eyes look a little glassy; Harry hopes to God he doesn’t cry.

“Would you punish Amir just to spite me?” he says, aching in a really specific way, aching from Louis’ attitude toward him. Resigned disappointment is wafting off of him, and it hurts even more than anger would.

“I’m not doing anything,” Louis says. “I’m thinking. I’m lettin’ him think. I’m trying to give him a bit of space. In the end, it’s his decision.”

“I really think taking a meeting with Jeff would help.”

“Yeah, fine, we’ll take your Jeff meeting. But I’m coming, and I’m there as his manager, alright?”

“Why would I have any objection to that?”

“I dunno what sort of arrangement the meeting’s contingent on,” Louis says. The sun peeks out from behind the clouds, and he flips his sunglasses down over his eyes.

“There was no _arrangement._ I mean, honestly...”

“Harry, don’t pretend like you don’t know how these sorts of things go. Wouldn’t be at all unheard of for there to be some sort of strings attached.”

“There aren’t strings,” Harry insists.

The silence stretches out long enough that Harry reaches up to turn the radio on, but then Louis says, “Okay.”

Harry glances at him. “Okay what?”

Louis shrugs. The sunglasses hide his eyes. “Okay. You say you’re sorry, you say you didn’t mean anythin’ shady by what you did, I believe you.”

They roll to a stop at a red light. The air is dusty here; the vegetation has grown more scrubby on their left.

“Are we driving somewhere in particular?” Harry says.

“I dunno. Santa Monica? There’s ice cream there.”

“That’s an hour away, it’ll melt by the time we get it back to them.”

“Well, life’s fuckin’ tragic like that.”

Harry laughs.

“I just want you to think of it from my point of view,” Louis says. “What if one of your actor friends did this with Marlena? Someone who had an Oscar or something? They came to one of her drama camp plays, when you weren’t there, and said, oh, she’s lovely, let’s put her in the movies! And — let’s say it’s Timothee Chamalet —“

“Chalamet.”

“Whoever. So she’s green, she’s got no idea what she’s getting into, but he goes and runs her in front of a bunch of sweaty old studio executives without your say-so. And when you complain, he says, oh, but Harry, I know better than you about her career. I have an Oscar, you dumb little man.”

“I never called you dumb!” Harry cries. “And Marlena is _eleven_!”

“Say for the sake of argument that she’s twenty when this happens. You think you’d still be fine with it?”

“Timothee Chalamet isn’t Marlena’s stepfather!”

“I know, Haz. You’re really torturin’ this metaphor, it was mostly a joke.”

“It’s an unfair joke. It’s mean-spirited, you know it isn’t fair. You know —“ Harry chokes on his words, then continues, while staring out over the ocean: “There was a time when I thought I might never have a baby, and I thought your kids might be the only kids I’d have in my life.”

“Harry,” Louis says sympathetically. “I understand. I get it. I’m not saying you don’t love him, mate. I know you do. I don’t doubt at all that you love my kids.”

“But you’re accusing me of all these terrible intentions.”

“Not _terrible_ , just human. Just a bit selfish and short-sighted. Is it so hard to admit that you could ever be those things?”

Harry sighs, then reaches down and adjusts the seat back a little more. His legs feel cramped. He stretches them out, feeling his bunched muscles flexing against the fabric of his jeans. “Maybe I just feel like it’s the Zayn thing getting between us again.”

“Yeah?” Louis says guardedly. “How’s that?”

“I’ve always thought you projected Zayn on Amir.”

“He’s my son with Zayn, I think I’m entitled.”

“But that means of course you’re going to flip out on me if you think I’m trying to steal Amir, ‘cos in your mind I took Zayn, too.”

Louis snorts. “Alright, with the Freud shit. ‘Cos I can’t possibly just be worried about my kid.”

“The level of hostility, though, mate! And,” Harry bursts out, “what really fuckin’ gets at me is, Zayn just gets to escape any role in this as usual, ‘cos he was literally asleep.”

“He was sick! He didn’t _have_ a role, beyond being proud! Harry… look, friend to friend, you’re sounding a bit crazy this morning. You’re aware of that, right?”

“Maybe,” Harry admits.

“And you’ve become a bit of a control freak.”

“‘Scuse me?”

“Harold,” Louis says, giving him an amused look. “C’mon. You’ve been bored lately, admit it.”

“Maybe I have been. Is that so awful? I like to do big things, I like to get things done, keep moving. My personality has to come out _somewhere_.”

“Right, so, if you need to go back to bein’ full tilt on your career, just go do that! I’m sure Zayn wouldn’t mind.”

“He‘s got all these projects going on, of course he’d mind.”

“Do you two need couples’ counseling, or something?” Louis says.

“No,” Harry immediately snaps.

“It’s not that big a deal. Me and Liam considered going, back when we had all the kids under one roof. Shit gets to you after a while.”

“We don’t need counseling. We’re happy.”

“Well, have you talked to him about his show, at all?”

Harry glances over at him. “What about it?”

“About that we don’t like the sort of message it’s sending?”

“Oh. No, why?”

“‘Cos you’re married to him?”

Harry shrugs. “It’s his career, he can do what he wants. And it’s not like he writes the show.”

“Right, but… he’s producing it, so it follows that he approves of the content, and he’s married to you, so then it sort of feels like a tacit endorsement from the band, which I’m a bit against.”

“Then you talk to him.”

“He knows how I feel,” Louis says. “Was just wondering if you’ve told him you feel the same way.”

“Me and him are different than you and him were. I don’t give mandates.”

Louis lets out a laugh. “Alright. Whatever.”

“Sorry. I wasn’t slagging you off.”

“No, I get it.”

“And you know I don’t get into things like that in interviews,” Harry says. “So if you want to come out and say the band’s against it, go ahead. I won’t dispute it or anything.”

“But that would be a bit odd, me coming after him, considering he joined back up with us for our last tour cycle. I know he doesn’t consider himself really back in the band, but it might be confusing to the fans.”

“Then don’t say anything,” Harry says, annoyed by Louis projecting complexity onto something that feels very simple to him.

They fall quiet for a while.

“Look, if the alternative to you being allowed to go back to work is you losing the plot, I think Zayn’d find a compromise,” Louis says.

“I’m not losing the plot,” Harry mutters. “Just feeling a bit stir crazy, maybe.”

“Yeah?”

They’re leaving the scrub behind now, as the coast opens back up into lush green hills.

“It’s just, you know how it is with kids this age,” Harry says. “I’ve really, y’know, I’ve made my lives center around them for the last two years. All their activities, their friends, any interests they’ve had… but you know how that is. You sort of lose yourself. And they’re just too young to really… y’know? If Marlena _were_ twenty, I could be taking her to auditions. I could be getting her modeling gigs. But she’s just a kid... I want to try to let her be a kid. Me and Zayn agreed we don’t want the kids in the business ‘til they’re adults. So I’m just in this no man’s land.”

“I know the no man’s land. Not big on short-term satisfaction.”

“I’ve been a good sport,” Harry says, feeling defensive. “I haven’t complained once. You know how worried I was about Zayn when he relapsed, you know I would’ve done anything to help him with what he was going through at the time, and I did! I gave up my career!”

“That wasn’t just for him, lad. You needed a break. You needed to spend more time with your girls. I think you just have a hard time not going a hundred percent on whatever you’re doing, and you didn’t fix that problem. You just redirected it to something else, but y’know what? Quiet moments with your kids, just watching them grow up and helping them slowly turn into people, yeah, that’s never gonna give you the sort of high that you’re gonna get from performing, or winning Golden Globes, or seeing your big gob on the movie screen.”

Harry is hurt by this, and falls quiet.

“One more thing before I drop this entire topic for good,” Louis says. “Amir just got married. He’s got someone he has to factor into his plans, now, and part of why they got married was to make sure they stayed on the same page. So this is all a _lot_ of pressure on him right now.”

“That genuinely didn’t occur to me.”

“I know it didn’t,” Louis says frankly.

Tears prickle at Harry’s eyes, and he stares out over the ocean again, his face hot.

“I really thought we were past this,” he says with difficulty. “You thinking so badly of me. Is this really where we’re at, after thirty years?”

“Harry,” Louis says in a soft voice that Harry can barely hear over the whipping wind. “I don’t think badly of you.”

“You do,” Harry chokes out. “You think I’m some sort of robot! You do.”

“I don’t at all think you’re a robot.”

There’s a pull-off for a gas station up ahead. Louis slows down, takes it and parks the car on a patch of dirt. An emerald valley spreads out below them, rimmed by the lip of the ocean.

“D’you understand this was hurtful to me?” Louis says, looking at him. Harry doesn’t meet his gaze; he’s too embarrassed. “You didn’t think about me, I know you didn’t. You didn’t worry I’d be hurt, you just worried I’d be angry at you. You didn’t think of me as Amir’s manager, or his mentor. Y’know, he didn’t spring fully-formed from Zayn’s forehead… he’s my son too. But I don’t think you think, when you look at his talent, that I had anything to do with it. That I introduced him to the piano, which I also play. That I sat with him for hours while he learned concertos, and researched and hired instructors, and took him to recitals, and coached him, and nurtured him. That I found him a vocal coach.”

Harry sniffles.

“I’m not slamming on Zayn here,” Louis says, “‘cos he’s been a great, supportive dad, and I know you two went through something proper hard. But when Amir started getting serious about the piano, that’s right around the time that you two were trying to have a baby. When his teacher said he should start taking masterclasses with, like, world-renowned pianists, that was right around when Zayn went on tour, so I arranged it. When he moved to New York and wanted to start playing in a combo, I put him in touch with the right people. When he wanted to start doing session work, I guided him through making that happen.”

He breaks off, his voice getting rough.

“I don’t tend to get credit for things,” Louis says hoarsely. “I’ve learned to just sort of accept that in life. People just look over me, for some reason. But you’re not gonna do that when it comes to my fucking son. No. I can’t let you do that. Not when my intuition’s tellin’ me to pump the brakes on this. I have to protect him.”

“I know you do,” Harry says. “I’m sorry. Alright? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to overlook you.”

“I believe you that it wasn’t intentional.”

“It’s not like I haven’t done anything to help his career before this, y’know. I didn’t just jump in now ‘cos I thought there was money to be made. I’ve been supporting him for years!”

“I know you have! You’ve been a huge help, getting him more high-profile session work. That’s big, that helps his resume so much. That’s part of why this is so, like, crazy-making, ‘cos I thought we were on the same page! I thought we were teammates, and you sandbagged me.”

“You never told me the plan!” Harry cries. “You’d never laid it out for me the way you just did!”

“I didn’t think I had to! I’ve discussed this with Zayn!”

“Right, so you told Zayn, who forgets to tell me things all the time, and I’m sure you told Liam, ‘cos you tell him everything, and what, you just don’t tell me?”

“I thought you knew! You’re in the business!”

“I’m not a talent manager, I couldn’t possibly see things from your point of view!”

“Oh, Harry, c’mon, I don’t believe for a second that you’re that dim.”

“Maybe I am,” Harry challenges. “I’m your ex’s stupid bimbo of a second husband, please indulge me.”

Louis laughs, which feels like a good sign. Then he undoes his seatbelt and leans his seat back, rubbing his hands over his face and softly sighing.

“Look,” Harry says, then hesitates. “Probably you’re not the only one who projects Zayn on Amir, alright? Maybe I do as well.”

Louis splits his middle and ring fingers apart so he can peek at Harry.

“I’ve always sort of wanted to guide Zayn’s career,” Harry admits. “But he’s always been too proud to let me do that, I think ‘cos me and him have a bit of a history as competitors. And I understand. I do. I just feel like he’s this wonderful vocal talent, and I think he’s let his personal life get in the way of things a bit, and, y’know, had these disputes with labels and managers and just… I dunno. He can be difficult, I know that. It’s part of his appeal. It’s flattering, y’know? Being one of the people he actually likes and respects?”

Louis drops his hands and laughs. “Yeah. I know.”

“But that doesn’t extend to him letting me help him,” Harry says. “Like I said, he’s too proud. And I get it. It’s… fraught. So, like… I’ve been following Amir’s career, and helping where I can, and I’m sorry, I can’t help it, I do look at him and see young Zayn. Just… the way he looks, and his voice.”

Louis nods.

“But I feel like, the more mature Amir’s gotten, the more he’s willing to try new things, or look silly, and he’s sort of still innocent, y’know? He listens, and he’s just… He’s in it for the pure joy of it, and you can tell.” He tentatively adds: “In that way, he actually reminds me of you.”

Louis looks surprised at this. He flashes Harry a quick, wobbly smile.

“He’s not cynical yet,” Harry says. “It’s nice.”

“Which is exactly why I wanted to wait before approaching the laaaaabels,” Louis groans.

“I know, I know, I know,” Harry says apologetically. “I fucked up. I get it now, I really do. But… I think we can salvage this, yeah? I think we can compromise somehow. And I really think talking to Jeff is a good idea.”

“We’ll talk to your precious Jeff, I already said we’d talk to fuckin’ Jeff.”

“You don’t have to sound so excited about it,” Harry says, and Louis chokes out a laugh. “Is Jeff really that worse than Simon?”

“Simon is the devil I know, first off,” Louis says. “And I know better than to ask him to so much as look sideways at my son.”

“Listen, are you really alright with the other meetings I want to take him to, over these next few days?” Harry says. “Plus maybe an interview or two while the iron is hot? And then you can come back down, and we can meet with Jeff, and you two can go home and get away from the L.A. of it all.”

“Yeah, that all sounds fine,” Louis says, shrugging. “Sure. And thank you.”

“For what?”

“For, y’know, the other meetings. The non-music things. I know he definitely needs that, and you’re much better connected to that world, so I do appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome.”

“If he wanted to wear trackies all the time, I could hook him up,” Louis adds. “But, y’know, he’s such a princess. Wants to wear pants that actually zip.”

Harry’s smile spreads to a grin. “Lou,” he says. “I really am sorry.”

Louis nods. “You’re forgiven,” he says. “I’m sorry for the twenty four hour-long freakout.”

“Consider it forgotten. And, yeah... I admit, I’d be quite upset if Timothee came ‘round trying to get his hands on either of my daughters.”

“See?”

“I haven’t given up on an Oscar, though, to be clear.”

“If I had money on anyone to pull that off, it’d be you.” Louis starts up the car again and puts it in self-drive, then slips a baseball cap over his head and angles the brim over his eyes, sinking back into his reclined seat. “Wake me up when we get to Jeni’s?”

“Hey,” Harry says. “What did Liam have to say about all this?”

“Huh?”

“I’m sure you rang him last night and ran it down for him, what’d he say?”

Louis sighs through his nose. “Typical Liam shit.”

Harry grins. “Like what?”

“Oh, y’know…” Louis affects a Liam impression. “‘I’m on your side, but I can see things from his point of view, but I’m on your side, but I don’t think Harry was necessarily being malicious, but I understand why you’re upset, but maybe he wasn’t intentionally trying to upset you, and maybe you were a little sensitive, although he was being a little insensitive!’ Talked himself in a circle for a half hour.”

“And you took how much of that into consideration?”

“Fifty percent,” Louis says, then flashes a smile. “Guess which fifty.”

LOS ANGELES, AUGUST 14, 2039

Amir is chilling with Todd and his brother Corey on the front porch of their parents’ Thousand Oaks house when a red convertible with Louis and Harry in it pulls up out front.

He’s surprised to see them this early; he’d dropped a pin and texted his dad _come get me whenever,_ but he wasn’t expecting him for another hour, at least.

“Is that Harry Styles?” Corey says, sounding shocked.

“Yeah, man,” Amir says. “He’s my stepdad.”

“No, I knew that, but just… in the flesh like that. Wild.”

Louis leads the way, stopping at the bottom of the porch stairs while Harry lingers a step behind him. “Oi,” he calls. “Hi Todd. Hi Corey.”

“Hey man,” Corey says, waving.

“Louiiiiis!” Todd calls affectionately. “You want a beer? I can give you one legally now, isn’t that tight?”

Louis laughs. “Sure,” he says, and holds his hand up. Todd tosses him an IPA from the six-pack on the table they all have their feet up on.

Todd was one of Amir’s burnout friends in high school who he mostly only partied with, but he lived down the street from them in Calabasas, so Louis is pretty familiar with him. Todd and Corey’s house had burned down too. Their parents made a sizable donation to a benefit concert Louis and Liam helped organize a few months after the wildfires, to help lower-income locals who had lost their homes get back on their feet, so Louis is fond of that whole family now.

“Alright, I’m gonna head out,” Amir says, getting up and dapping Todd and Corey, who still looks starstruck from Harry’s silent presence. “I’ll see you guys.”

“Hey, make sure you come back down for my set at BeatFest,” Todd says. “October sixth! Don’t forget.”

“I’ll try to make it,” Amir promises, then heads down the stairs waving bye.

He slips his wedding band out of his pocket as they walk to the car, putting it back on his finger.

Louis notices this and says, “Not telling your friends yet?”

“Nah. Don’t want to answer dumb questions. Hi Harry.”

“Hi,” Harry says.

“Why are you two together?” Amir says, hopping over the side of the R8 and collapsing haphazardly into the back seat while Harry and Louis climb in front.

“He’s hiding from Taylor Swift,” Louis whispers.

“I am not,” Harry says. “I’m a grown man, I don’t hide from people.”

“She and Zayn have been hanging out all morning,” Louis explains as he pulls out, meeting Amir’s eye in the rear view mirror. “We went out, brought back ice cream, stood there for about ten minutes, then Harry turns to me and goes, in the fakest voice I’ve ever heard, ‘Let’s go pick up Amir together!’ and drags me out the house.”

“Wow, so I’m just an alibi?” Amir jokes to Harry.

“No,” Harry exclaims. “I wanted to see you. I just rushed the timeframe.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’ve got no idea how to talk to her, is all,” Harry says to Louis. “And her and Zayn have the _oddest_ relationship.”

Louis uses his keychain to crack the beer open and takes a long sip, then hands it to Harry, who does the same. “You think, uh…”

“No,” Harry says immediately. “No, I don’t think.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

“What are you guys talking about?” Amir says curiously.

“Nothing,” they say simultaneously.

Amir squints at them, but lets it go. “Hey, take me to Malibu,” he says. “I want to hang out with Taylor Swift. Maybe she’ll have career advice.”

Harry’s entire face drops, and Louis starts cackling.

“What?” Amir says with a grin.

“Nothing,” Louis says, still laughing. “Weird morning.”

“So, um.” Amir clears his throat. “Evan finally told his parents this morning.”

Louis catches his eye again. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“How’d that go?”

“Uh,” Amir says shakily, clearing his throat again. “They’re like, completely shocked. They asked him if he wants to get an annulment.”

Louis sighs and takes the beer back from Harry. “Fantastic.”

“It’s just really bad timing, I think,” Amir says, almost like he’s pleading. “They used to really like me. I think if I fly out there, I could smooth things over.”

Up front, Louis and Harry exchange a glance.

“Love, Harry has some meetings set up for you, these next few days,” Louis says. “With designers, and people like that. He wants to get you a new wardrobe, and for you to get some media training, and maybe bring someone on to help you with your social media part-time. Organize photoshoots, curate it, things like that.”

All thoughts of Evan’s parents fly out of Amir’s head. “Yeah? We’re doing that for real?”

“Yeah. And then a formal meeting with Jeff Azoff in four days, which I’ll come back down for, and you and I can head back to the Sac together.”

“Why do you keep saying ‘Jeff Azoff’ like that?” Amir says.

“Like what?”

“Like you’re saying ‘veal pens.’”

Harry laughs hard at this.

“I’m unbiased,” Louis says. “Just here to advise.”

“Sure, Dad.”

“I also, um, made you a doctor’s appointment,” Louis says.

Amir knows doctor means therapist. “Same lady from before?”

“Same lady from before. You liked her, didn’t you?”

“She was fine,” Amir demurs.

“Well, I’ll put the details in your calendar. Be nice to just talk to someone, I think. Hash things out.”

He fiddles with his wedding band, and then with his watch. “Yeah.”

“You haven’t been looking at social media, right?” Louis says to him.

Amir shakes his head. “No, I logged out of everything.”

“And you’re not looking?” he prods.

“No, Dad, you know I hate looking at that stuff to begin with.”

Amir is somewhat lying; he did take a peek at the Twitter fervor last night, after he went to bed. It was exciting to observe people discussing him outside of the context of his parents, for once.

But then he saw a few really nasty tweets about himself, and his stomach crawled up into his throat. He logged out, then, and he’s stayed that way all morning.

He’s not used to getting personally slagged off. Usually it’s within a broader context — the person doesn’t like One Direction, or they think celebrity kids are obnoxious and find news coverage of them even moreso. None of it has to do with him on a personal level. Mostly he’s ended up on listicles like _Cutest celeb kids!_ and _Children of musicians who you didn’t know were also musicians!_ and _You won’t believe how grown-up these celeb kids are now!_ which are flattering and mostly neutral. Just content for content’s sake.

The one thing he was really happy to see this morning was a text from Teddy saying _SAW THE VIDEO! BRILLIANT JOB LUV! xxxxx_. For some reason, that made him feel like everything was going to be okay.

“Do you guys ever avoid looking at stuff?” he says. “I feel like you’ve always been all over social media, as long as I can remember.”

“Well, you have to remember, we were like, the first-ever truly social media band,” Louis says. “We wouldn’t be anythin’ without it. It’d be very odd if any of us just said no, that’s it, I’m finished forever. Though your dad does get like that sometimes.”

“But it never sticks,” Harry says with a grin.

“Right.” Louis twiddles his thumbs on the steering wheel. “To answer your question, I’ve taken a break from looking at things, a few times. Really just when I was pregnant with your sister, and then you, ‘cos I was quite sensitive ‘round then, and people were saying some really awful things. Not fans, mind. Well, a few fans, especially when I was pregnant with Mims, ‘cos everyone thought me getting pregnant had broke the band up. But other than that, I try to keep an eye on it. And I tell people off when they’re lying particularly blatantly, but I try to pick my battles. Early on, especially, you’ve really got to pick your battles. You just have to keep perspective, maybe put the phone down and go to Top Golf with some pals, whatever brings you back to reality.”

“I try not to look at anything,” Harry says. “Which in practice means I actually look at everything. But it’s gotten less hard on me as I’ve gotten older. I sort of just laugh, now. People get very passionate.”

“But the news and social media are different,” Amir says. “Like, when TMZ says stuff, it feels shittier than like, one person tweeting it.”

“No, you’re right,” Louis says. “The two just get all mixed up nowadays. Reckon the rags are worse ‘cos they’re more immoral, since they’re doing it for money, and they’re got more resources to pry into your life with. But individual people can say more heinous shit, ‘cos there’s no, like, editorial standards they have to meet.”

“Right,” Amir says, his heart falling. Enduring either on a larger scale than he already does sounds extremely painful.

“Listen, you’ll have to learn to focus on the good things and tune the bad shit out,” Louis says. “If you create somethin’ people love, there’s gonna be so much kindness out there, and you just have to focus on that, and not look at the rags and the trolls.”

“Yeah,” Amir says, shrugging.

Louis glances at him in the rearview. “You’re in an odd spot right now, ‘cos you don’t really have output, besides with your jazz bands and as a session artist. There isn’t anything for the normal layperson to attach to or judge you off of other than your performance last night, and you can’t really judge a live performance from a video. I’ve worked with a few musicians in this position before, mostly people who’ve won X-Factor, that sort of thing.”

“I have some songs up on SoundCloud,” Amir says. “Actually, one of them’s getting hits.”

“Oh yeah? Which one?”

“Just something I recorded in college with my friend Marcus in like, twenty minutes. I sing on it, and play steel drums.”

Harry laughs. “You play steel drums?”

“Just a little,” Amir says. "I'm not much of a percussionist."

“I’ll do you one weirder, he also plays the _banjo_ ,” Louis says, and Harry nods with respect. “Well, anyway, what I meant was, all this attention you’re getting is based on potential and hearsay, and that tends to make people angry, for some reason. But your real core fans’ll come in due time, and they’ll defend you from nonsense.”

“That does sound nice.”

Louis smiles. “It is! Yeah.”

“And, as I said last night, there’s nothing wrong with manipulating the system to keep things private,” Harry adds. “Don’t tell anyone anything you don’t want leaked. Make your team sign NDAs. Sue anyone who steps out of line.”

“Alright,” Louis interrupts. “That shit’s above his pay grade.”

“In what way?”

“Well, he hasn’t even _got_ a ‘team’, first off.”

“I’m in the process of developing him one,” Harry says.

Louis sighs.

Amir can tell this is the continuation of an argument they were probably having on the way over here, so he quickly says, “Is everything cool with the band, Dad? Are they pissed or anything?”

“No, no! They had a great time, plus all the press is giving them a streaming bump,” Louis says. “Although, erm — this is between you and me, and please don’t take it personally, but Danny is fairly unhappy.”

“Danny? Oh, shit, the guy I filled in for?”

“Yeah. He’s been hearing things inside rehab, he’s apparently getting convinced I’m trying to permanently replace him with you.” Louis flaps his hand. “I’m handling it, don’t worry.”

“You sure?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Your dad’s good at handling people,” Harry says. “At least, when he wants to be.”

Louis laughs.

SACRAMENTO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, AUGUST 14, 2039

Amir does ultimately end up back at the Malibu house, though Taylor is long gone by then. He’s playing tag with Marlena and Toni in their sprawling front yard when Louis heads out, while Zayn shouts at the kids from a lounge chair to watch out for the croquet hoops.

Harry comes up to Louis’ car to say goodbye before he peels off down their long driveway.

“Don’t sell my son before I get back,” Louis says sternly.

Harry grins. “I won’t. Less I can get a good deal on him.”

“Hold out for a few million, at the least.”

“We’ll see,” Harry says, and Louis gives him the finger, but they’re both smiling. “I’ll text you updates, alright?”

“You better.”

Louis falls asleep for his entire hour-long flight; a flight attendant has to zip open his privacy pod and shake him awake right before they land.

“Sorry,” he says apologetically, “but we’re taxiing.”

“You’re fine, love,” Louis says, blinking, completely bleary and not totally sure where he is.

He arranged for a bodyman to meet him at the airport, just in case there’s a bum’s rush, although that happens much more rarely now. The bodyman is Eli, who he used on his tour. Eli is comfortingly about seven feet tall and as wide as an outhouse. He clears an easy path through the thick Sunday foot traffic of arriving businessmen and departing tourists. Louis trails behind him on autopilot, pulling his wheeled suitcase.

He got papped at LAX, but he doesn’t here. Possibly the biggest perk of relocating their home base to Sacramento has been the relative privacy.

Louis blinks hard as they step outside into the bright shine of waning daylight. Liam is waiting for him outside in the kiss and ride lane, leaning on the hood of his black Lambo with sunglasses on like he’s a very rich greaser.

“Oi,” Louis hollers at him, waving, his heart pounding in his chest at the sight of him.

Liam stands and smiles big, spreading his arms. Once he’s about ten feet away, Louis abandons his suitcase and speeds toward him, throwing himself against him and wrapping his arms straitjacket-tight around Liam’s waist. Liam does that wonderful thing he does where he envelops all of Louis in a warm squeeze. It’s like being swallowed by a black hole or eaten by a whale; he disappears into Liam’s grasp, and the rest of the world goes quiet.

“Hi,” Louis says very softly.

Liam doesn’t talk, just kisses his face and head over and over, tightening his arms until the air is being crushed from Louis, but in a good way.

Louis grips his left wrist with his right hand, bracketing the hard muscle of Liam’s waist, refusing to let go. He can smell exhaust and late summer heat, and he hears people walking by and talking to each other, or on the phone, planes rumbling, cars whooshing by.

He starts to draw back, but Liam holds him tight and buries his face in his neck. “Not yet.”

“Yeah?” Louis murmurs.

“I missed you, sunshine.”

“Me too… me too.”

They nuzzle, rubbing their faces together. Louis is amused to see that Liam has grown an unkempt baby beard too. Eli nudges them toward the curb so he can pack Louis’ suitcase into the Lambo’s hood trunk, and they stagger as one, intertwined.

“Alright,” Liam says, starting to pull away, then. This time Louis is the one to protest and cling on. Liam immediately stops moving and resumes squeezing him as tight as he can.

Louis nuzzles his nose into Liam’s beard, scraping his cheek against his, then presses his nose into the thicket of longish (for Liam’s standards) hair behind his ear. He sniffs his neck — earthy cologne mixed with sweat from waiting outside in August.

“Can we just walk ‘round like this for a bit, babe?” he mumbles into the shoulder of Liam’s jacket. “Hugging?”

“Sure, why not?”

“We’ll have to let go eventually.”

“No we don’t.”

Louis gives him a kiss on the cheek.

“I love you,” Liam says softly to him, pressing their foreheads together.

“I love you too.”

“Never go anywhere ever again.”

“Just come with me next time.”

“Okay,” Liam agrees.

They’re quiet for a moment.

“I sorta don’t want to go home to my children,” Louis admits. “They’re nearly all in a crisis, and I’m so tired.”

“Aww, Tommo.”

“Can we just run away together?”

“Sure,” Liam says, obviously joking. “Let’s go to San Fran.”

“But we sold our flat.”

“We’ll get a hotel.”

“What’ll we tell the kids?”

“Fuck ‘em, we’ll turn our phones off.”

Louis laughs. “I’m just being silly,” he says. “I miss them something awful. Well, not Mims, I’ve just seen her yesterday. But the others. God, was that only yesterday? This was one of the longest weeks I can remember.”

As he babbles, Liam takes Louis’ face in his hands and kisses him tenderly on the forehead, then rubs their noses together. “Scruffy,” he croons.

Louis melts a little. “Did you really miss me this much?”

“Oh, angel, you’ve got no idea.”

*

Eli follows them home in his Escalade so he can get started on their security team’s weekly Sunday sweep of the ranch’s massive grounds, and Liam puts the Lambo on self-driving mode so the two of them can talk without distractions. Over the twenty-five minute drive they cover loads of ground — Liam offers up more theories on Harry’s antics, Mia’s crisis, and Amir’s hasty marriage, and Louis plumbs him for more information about Patrick’s suspension, then helps him refine and expand the punishment strategy he’d developed.

Liam’s so relieved to have him back. Without him here, the idea of properly disciplining Patrick made him feel like he was out helpless on a ledge, but with Louis at his side, he’s on solid ground again. They’re a team. They just don’t work as well without each other.

They’re home and rolling along the endless driveway when Louis reaches over and feels for his cock in his pants.

Liam looks over at him, grinning.

“I know we’ve got a million things to worry about,” Louis says throatily, “but all I can really think about is how bad I want you inside me. I want you to make me scream. And I wanna come on your face and watch you lick it off.”

“Oh,” Liam groans, his guts churning hotly and blood flooding to his crotch. “Yeah yeah. Yeah. Tonight, tonight, please.”

“If it weren’t for our fuckin’ kids I’d just tell you to throw me down in the foyer and fuck me right there.”

“Don’t do this to me,” Liam begs. “I'm so pent-up, if you get me hard, it’s gonna take an hour to go away.”

Louis knows full well that it’s mean of him to work Liam up like this, but he always does it anyway. He’s aware that it's especially hard for alphas to come down from getting revved up, which is part of the appeal, because Louis lives to tease, distract, and enchant him.

Liam can’t say he minds too much.

“Stupid kids,” Louis mutters, continuing to rub Liam’s cock. “I swear to fuckin’ God, y’know? They’re lucky I love them more than anythin’ in the world. I can’t even be chuffed that I pulled off a world tour after not releasing a solo album for nearly twenty years. Can’t be proud of myself that I sold out tickets way beyond what my management thought I could do. Can’t come home and have a well-deserved break, a moment of peace with me husband and our kids, no, no, have to be putting out fires the second I get back. Have to listen to Harold talkin’ to me like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. I swear, me and him should have a scrap once a year just for maintenance.”

The rubbing becomes more abusive the more annoyed he gets, until Liam gently stills his hand.

“Sorry,” Louis says, laughing.

“I get the frustration, I do.”

Louis takes his hand off Liam’s willy and rests it on his thigh. “Right, so, we’re settled on Paddy then? Grounded for three months, and he’s with me doing charity work at least one day every single day the rest of his suspension? And he has to come up with three new potential fundraising strategies for each charity we work with?”

“Yep.”

“Plus writing apology letters to the teachers he fucked over, and the principal, and doing extra chores? Anything else?”

“I think that was all of it.”

Louis hesitates. “You think we’re being too harsh?”

“What he did’s technically illegal in California,” Liam reminds him.

“Right. You’re right. He just drives me barmy… I _know_ he knows right from wrong, I know he’s not a little sociopath or anythin’, he just likes testing the rules so much, and he doesn’t ever seem to care about the consequences.”

“That’s exactly why we’re being hard on him,” Liam says. “We’ve got to crank up the consequences ‘til they’re effective.”

“I s’pose.”

“It’ll work,” Liam says. “Remember when he used to bite folks? Not going around still biting folks, is he?”

Louis laughs. “He was two!”

“Right, but we made it clear that wasn’t acceptable, and he learned.”

Crunching over gravel, the car pulls around the fountain in front of the house. Louis looks around, his eyes narrowed.

“What?” Liam says. “Something different?”

“Were our hedges always this ridiculous?” Louis says.

“Yeah, mate. You know I said full send on the grounds design.”

Louis smiles at him. “I love you.”

“Don’t take the piss,” Liam says, laughing.

“‘I love you’ is taking the _piss?_ ”

“When you’re saying it all, like, indulgent-like, ‘cos you think my hedges are funny, yeah, that’s the piss.”

“Aw, sweetheart.” Louis pats his dick, which Liam then tucks up inside his waistband. “This, here — keep that thought for later, yeah?”

“I don’t exactly have a choice.”

He grins. “I know.”

They get out of the car, and Liam fetches Louis’ massive bag for him while Louis stretches his hamstrings briefly. One of their groundskeepers comes around the side of the house, brushing off his work gloves, and they both shout “Hi Rick” to him.

“Hey guys,” Rick calls back, heading down the hill toward the fishing pond. “Liam, I just pruned the orange trees, they won’t need it again ‘til February.”

“Oh, cheers, thanks!”

Liam follows behind as Louis swipes into the house and pushes the door open, stepping into the grand foyer and shouting, “BOYS! OI OI!”

“Max might be out back, shooting hoops,” Liam says.

He isn’t, though. The twins both descend from the top floor, thundering down the wide staircase and flying at Louis like a pair of linebackers, simultaneously grabbing him into a hard hug.

Liam smiles as he watches this; they’re squeezing the life out of Louis, and he’s squeezing them just as hard.

“My boys, my boys,” Louis groans, thumping them hard on the back. “You missed me, huh?”

“Nah, not at all,” Liam says, making everyone laugh.

Louis reaches up with both hands to tousle their hair. “I missed you too, lads.”

“Get in, Dad,” Max says, beckoning Liam.

Liam comes over, wrapping his arms around Louis’ endlessly familiar form and the now ever-changing, ever-surprising rangy teenage frames of their sons. He does his best to crush all three of them in his grip — it’s harder than it used to be, when the twins were wee things.

They separate faster than they used to, too.

“Paddy?” Louis says, and takes Patrick’s face in his hands like he’s Fredo. Patrick avoids his gaze, looking chagrined. “The fuck am I gonna do with you, huh?”

“I dunno,” Patrick says uneasily.

Max glances between Louis and Liam, like he’s waiting to see how the boom will be lowered.

“Well, your dad and I have worked out your punishment,” Louis says, patting him on the cheek and releasing him. “But I don’t feel like discussing that right now, so you can just wait and sweat it out a bit. I want dinner, and I want to go say hullo to Sunday.”

Patrick looks at once relieved and queasily strung along.

“I picked up a salmon at the fish market this morning,” Liam says. “Was gonna do that for dins.”

Louis makes a face. “Payno, c’mon. I just got home, I want pizza.”

“Yeah yeah,” the twins cheer.

Louis shakes his sleeve back and starts tapping at his watch, opening the app for their usual pizza place, Tony’s In The Sac.

“An entire, massive salmon,” Liam adds in desperation.

“Well, bang it on the pizza, sweetheart,” Louis says without looking up, and claps Liam on the shoulder.

“I’ll have some salmon, Dad, I like salmon,” Max says to Liam, who mouths _thank you._

*

Louis finds Sunday out in the stables with that new horse she’s got, Ulysses. He approaches the stall so quietly she doesn’t hear him, and watches her for a while. She’s stretching his legs out, or something. He likes watching her with a horse; she always looks like the animal is an extension of her, a completely fluid part of her own body.

“Hi there,” he says after a moment, so he doesn’t startle her when she does spot him.

Sunday’s curly-haired head pops up over the side of the horse. “Hi!” she exclaims. “I didn’t know you got in.”

“I’m in, I’m in.”

Sunday brushes her hands off and comes to the stall door, shoving it open and darting out so she can wrap him up in a hug. Louis squeezes her tight.

“Hi love,” he says.

She draws back. “How was your flight?”

“No idea,” Louis says. “Slept through the entire thing.”

“Well, what about the tour?”

“Absolutely exhausting and very, very good. What’s going on with your horse, here?”

“Oh, I’m just doing some TTouch,” she says.

Louis knows she’s explained that to him before, but at the moment he can’t recall any knowledge of it from his stress-ravaged brain, so he just nods.

“Mia’s not home, if you didn’t know,” she says. “She’s been drinking with her teammates all day.”

“Aye, I knew. She texted.”

Sunday tucks a curl behind her ear and gnaws at her lip. “I’m kind of worried about her, lately,” she says.

“Me too,” Louis admits. The horse stomps its foot, and he flinches.

Sunday laughs. “He’s just stomping flies.”

“I know, but they make me nervous, these things. So large and twitchy.”

“Want to come pet him? I don’t think you two have really gotten to know each other, yet.”

“Nah, we haven’t. You got him the week I left for tour.”

Sunday slides the stall door open and beckons him in. Louis follows reluctantly, only out of the desire to be a supportive dad. Inside the stall, Ulysses lifts his black head and stares at Louis with those creepy sideways-pupiled eyes.

“Hullo,” Louis says nervously to him.

“Relax. He can sense you’re scared.”

“Oh, can he, now?”

“He’s a prey animal. They’re sensitive to fear. Just take a deep breath and let it out slowly.”

She always sounds so confident and calm when she discusses horse things. Louis obliges, pulling in air like he’s been trained to do as a vocalist.

“Now put one hand on him.” Sunday guides his hand. “Right here.”

Louis obliges; the horse is sleek and solid under his palm. He can feel rolling twitches moving through its massive muscles.

“You’re being braver than usual today,” Sunday says, smiling.

He grins back. “If he kicks me, I’m gonna be proper upset with you.”

“Ulysses wouldn’t.” She strokes the horse on his head. “He’s a sweet boy. I always pick the sweet ones.”

“Well, good.”

Louis drops his hand and steps back, watching her fetch a halter and gently ease it over the horse’s ears. Ulysses bows his head for her like he knows what she’s doing.

“I can’t believe Amir is married,” Sunday murmurs.

Louis’ heart lurches; he’d managed to put this out of his head. “I can’t either. Was it, um… was it a nice wedding?”

She glances away from her horse and meets his eyes. “Yeah, it was really sweet,” she says. “Did you see Mia’s photos?”

“I did! They were lovely.”

“They were texting me freaking out the other day, ‘cos nowhere in L.A. develops film anymore, and your flight was due in. I finally found an article about this tiny place in Hollywood that still does it.” Sunday clears her throat. “Listen, he really didn’t want to upset you guys. Amir, I mean.”

“I know he didn’t. Look, I eloped wiv his dad, I get the impulse. You just don’t want to give anyone the chance to hurt you by trying to talk you out of it.” He pauses. “Sometimes it’s the external pressures that are toughest to deal with in a relationship… I think for them, that’s absolutely the case.”

Sunday nods. “I think so too.”

Louis accompanies her as she leads the horse out of his stall and through the barn aisle, giving them both a wide berth.

“I said he won’t kick you!” she exclaims.

“I absolutely believe you, love,” Louis says, from about fifteen feet out in front of them.

They crest over the hill that overlooks the horse paddocks and the rear of the sprawling house from the left. Louis spots Liam coming around the side in his swim trunks, a towel draped over his shoulders, heading toward the pool in back. Liam had been getting a bit of a dad bod last winter, but now he’s shredded again, like he was working out like a fiend while Louis was gone.

“OI,” Louis shouts at him, and when Liam looks, he wolf-whistles at him. “Looking fit, Payno!”

Liam shouts something back at him that Louis can’t quite make out, but he can see that he’s grinning.

Sunday drops her horse’s rope on the ground so he can lower his head and graze. “Are you objectifying Dad again?” she says, laughing.

“Ahh, he likes it,” Louis says.

They’re quiet for a moment. Sunday watches her horse, and Louis watches Sunday.

“Hey,” he says after a moment, stepping a bit closer, under the boughs of the tree that’s towering above them. He drops the hand he was shading his eyes with. “Sunday?”

“Yeah?” Sunday says, glancing up at him.

“Listen…” He hesitates, feeling somewhat nervy. “You know, you, er, you can call me Dad, if you like.”

“Oh,” she says quietly. “Is this about my text?”

“Well, I did, like, read it,” Louis says, and they both laugh. “Couldn’t slip that one past the old man, sorry.”

“Um…” Sunday leans against her horse, resting an elbow on his back and squinting into the setting sun. Her eyes look especially like Liam’s when they catch the light like this, and she has a look on her face that he sometimes gets — worried, wary, desperate to please but not entirely sure how to do so. But other than Liam’s eyes and snub nose, her face is her mother’s: the regal mouth and cheekbones, the widow’s peak, the old-fashioned good looks like she’s stuck out of time. “I just, like…”

“You don’t have to make some grand decision, or anything,” Louis quickly adds. “I just wanted to make sure you knew that. I’d be touched if you want to, but I completely get it if you don’t.”

She shrugs, then smiles at him. “Can it be a sometimes thing? Like when it feels right?”

“‘Course!”

“Louis just feels more natural, most of the time,” Sunday says, dropping his gaze and turning hers back to the horse. “I’m just not used to feeling like it’s okay to call you Dad. My mom would’ve lost her mind if she ever heard me say that.”

“No, I know, I know.”

“And it’s kinda hard to start, at this age.” She sounds regretful.

Louis’ chest hurts. “You know I always would’ve let you, in a heartbeat,” he says. He thinks of Sunday as a little girl — how demure and polite she was, how much she wanted to be loved — and the hurt worsens. “It was just, like you said, I didn’t want to cause problems.”

“Oh, I know,” Sunday says softly, nodding. “D’you know how, um... have you talked to my dad about this?”

“I haven’t, actually. Not about this specifically.”

“‘Cos I don’t want to call you Dad in front of Dad one time and like, give him a heart attack,” she says, smiling.

“Oh, it wouldn’t,” Louis says. “He’s in very good shape. No, I’m kidding, love. It just might take him some getting used to. He still — I know you and I’ve talked about this before, but I think he just doesn’t like to be reminded that, y’know, him and your mum couldn’t work things out. I think the bond you and I have, as much as he’s glad for it, it causes him a bit of pain in that department.”

“He’s very good at denial,” Sunday says wryly.

“Oh, well,” Louis blusters.

“Come on. You know how he is.” She really is taking a cue from Mia, lately; she sounds exactly like her. _‘You know how he is’_ is Mia’s favorite line on Zayn.

“He has trouble communicating his emotions, sometimes,” Louis says. “Sometimes things don’t come out right. But you know how he actually feels.”

“I do. You know I go off actions more than words, anyway.”

“I do know that about you.”

“So it’s okay if you and I don’t always have the right words, right? It’s not our fault, it’s everybody else’s fault.”

Louis cracks a smile at her.

Sunday looks a little worried as she adds, “Me calling you Louis doesn’t make you feel less dad-like, does it?”

“Oh, sweets, not at all. Call me whatever. Just, y’know, not ‘dickhead’ or anything.”

She laughs.

“How are you lately, with your mum?” Louis says. “Have you talked?”

Sunday’s face shutters, and her eyes go void of emotion. “She called me on the Fourth of July.”

“Yeah? Fourth of July rates a call? Maybe that’s a good sign.”

“No, it’s a big East Coast old money holiday,” she mutters. “Her family goes all out for it, they were probably asking about me, so she just called so they won’t know anything’s wrong between us.”

“Ah, okay.”

Sunday reaches up to pet the horse some more, leaning on his sturdy body like it’s tethering her to the earth.

“You alright?” Louis says.

She shakes her head. “I just feel like I should talk to her,” she says. “I want really badly to _want_ to talk to her. I miss her, or at least I think I miss her? But every time we do talk, she reminds me why I don’t want to. And I’m just waiting for the day that she calls and apologizes for everything and asks me to forgive her. It drives me crazy that she’s just angry about you adopting me, that she thinks it was just a ‘fuck you’ to her, instead of like, being hurt and asking herself, like, ‘What have _I_ done wrong, that this is the situation?’ You know? Just some accountability. For once! Just one time, just one completely truthful phone call. She could go back to normal afterwards, I don’t care, I just want _one_ phone call.”

Louis reaches up and touches the horse, too, smoothing a hand over its back. He wants to reach out for Sunday instead, but he knows her, and he can tell she doesn’t want hugged right now. “I know what you mean,” he says quietly.

“Am I ever gonna stop waiting for that?”

He hesitates. “Maybe not,” he says. “But you’ll forget you’re waiting, after a while.”

“How long?” Sunday says in a small voice.

“Give it another few years.”

“Okay, Dad,” she says ruefully.

Louis laughs and smiles at her.

He thinks of the call that Liam got from Ceci when he was pregnant with the twins, the weepy apologetic one, the ‘I still want you’ one, and how all it did was hurt Liam and stress him out. Louis would never tell Sunday about that, but he sort of wishes he could, just so she’d know that even if she gets this thing she wants, it won’t make up for years of missed opportunities and neglect. It can’t.

She’ll learn that in time, though. It’s just Louis’ parental compulsion to shield his kids. He doesn’t want Sunday to learn this terrible lesson the hard way.

But there isn’t any other way to learn some things.

*

Louis and Liam bring Patrick into the big den for his formal sentencing, the one with the massive piano and the sprawling fireplace and the mounted head of a boar that Liam was gifted by an oddball aristocrat friend of his. Louis sits across from his son and lays out why what Patrick did was wrong, and wrong-headed. Liam stands behind him like a bodyguard, nodding or saying, “Right, exactly,” when needed.

Patrick gazes back at Louis with a complicated expression in his dark eyes, one both simultaneously defiant and remorseful. He inherited the most childlike of both Louis and Liam’s features, so it pains them to dress him down, sometimes. He looks a bit younger than he is, and there’s an innocence to him that has always belied his precocious personality.

Louis has always gone easy on him, too. That’s a mistake he readily admits. He found Patrick’s penchant for mischief cute and funny and like his own, while Liam was concerned by it. He couldn’t help doting on his wee son, his youngest child (if only by three minutes), so little at birth, so funny and charming (particularly by Louis’ standards of funny and charming).

As he winds down his spiel, Louis tells him, “I’m really disappointed in your behavior,” and Patrick’s eyes well up with tears.

Louis softens but tries not to let on.

“Okay,” Patrick says, ducking his head, obviously trying to not cry in front of them. “Can I go now?”

“Go where?”

He shrugs. “To my room?”

Louis and Liam glance at each other.

“Alright,” Louis says. “I guess we’re finished, sure.”

Patrick hops to his feet and hurries off, out into the hall. Louis watches him go, then sighs.

“It’s alright, Lou,” Liam says. “Let him be upset, yeah? Let him feel the sting a little. I’m _glad_ he’s upset. It means the consequences are working.”

“But he doesn’t seem to care much about them,” Louis says. “He’s only upset ‘cos he thinks I’m angry with him. I’m never this hard on him.”

Liam leans down and presses a kiss to the nape of his neck. “Exactly, and that’s how he knows he really messed up this time.”

“He’s just a kid, he’s gonna do stupid shit, it’s part of being a kid.”

“And it’s our job to handle it.”

“I know,” Louis sighs.

They get distracted for a little while, because the pizza delivery drone lands on the roof by accident and Liam has to grab the ladder to go rescue it, then they’ve got to prevent the growth spurt-hungry Max from stealing pizza before they’ve officially called everyone to the table. Liam tells Max he can have one little slice if he beats him at arm wrestling, so while they’re doing that, Louis traipses up the stairs and heads to Patrick’s room.

He knocks.

“Yeah?” Patrick calls.

“Can I come in?”

“Yeah.”

Louis opens the door and sees him curled up in his dark blue comforter, staring at his phone. His room is spotless for once (Liam must have been hounding him about cleanup since he’s been suspended, because they’ve asked their housekeeper to not do the kids’ rooms for them anymore) and he’s picked up a few new posters since Louis left for tour. Mostly sports-related, and then one from the new James Bond film. The twins aren’t really into music — not yet, anyway.

He comes over and grabs the chair from Patrick’s desk, setting it down close to his bed. Patrick has tear tracks down his cheeks, and doesn’t look up when Louis sits down.

“Hey,” Louis says. He reaches out and strokes his wavy, golden-brown hair, pushing it back from his forehead.

“Hi,” Patrick mutters.

“What’s wrong, babe?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing, huh? Can I talk to you some more?”

Patrick fixes his gaze on Louis’ face, his mouth still tight with hurt. “I guess.”

“Alright. Well, look… I know Payno told you this, but you’re not a bad kid.”

“I feel like I am,” Patrick says, sounding surly.

“No, love.”

“Something about me just pisses people off. I’m serious.”

“That isn’t true.”

“Everyone’s always on my case! I’m always getting in trouble!”

“Paddy, you did something wrong. You’re facing the consequences. That’s how it works in this house.”

“But that’s all anyone expects from me anyway, is to do stuff that’s bad!”

“Not at all. Look, I’m not going to lie to you, you give me and your dad and your teachers a bit of a hard time, you always have. You test boundaries a lot, you’ve got that mischievous streak. That’s probably why you feel like everyone’s always on your case. But d’you think for a second that means me and Liam love you any less?”

Patrick shrugs.

This crushes Louis. “C’mon. No. I know you know that isn’t true.”

“Maybe not love me less, but _like_ me less, sometimes.”

“Paddy, no!”

“I wanted you to come home the other night,” Patrick says, his eyes flashing. “After your tour was over. And Dad said you were busy with your dinner, and Amir’s stuff —”

“I’m sorry, alright?” Louis says. “It’s a big deal, what’s going on with Amir, he’s in over his head —”

“It’s not a big deal what’s going on with me?”

“Love, you were home here with your father.”

“Amir has Zayn!”

Louis sighs. “It’s a different situation. I hadn’t even seen Amir all summer.”

“You didn’t see me all summer!” Patrick cries. “And you didn’t have to go to that charity dinner! You know, it _sucks_ sharing you with everyone, honestly.”

“You don’t share me with everyone,” Louis says patiently. “I’m your dad, always.”

“But you’re so nice to everyone else, and you’re always busting my balls, you never let me explain! I wish I was some random kid with cancer, so you’d treat me like you do them.”

Louis grabs him hard by the wrist and looks fiercely into his eyes. Patrick looks scared, like he realizes what he just said was stupid, but doesn’t know how to backtrack.

“Don’t say that,” Louis says. “Don’t say that ever again.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it.”

“You are an incredibly lucky young man. Never take anything about your life for granted, alright? And I love you more than anythin’ in the world. I _know_ you know that, or you wouldn’t be so comfortable talking to me with this disrespect.”

Patrick shrugs, and Louis releases him. “I didn’t mean to be disrespectful.”

“You’re upset, I get it.”

“It just sucked not having you here. That’s all.”

“Oh, Paddy… d’you not think I missed you too? I thought about you and Max a million times a day. Did you not get all my little texts?” Louis swallows over a lump in his throat. “I thought I was bothering you, honestly. Sometimes you didn’t respond.”

Patrick’s eyes well up with tears again. He picks at his blanket. “You weren’t bothering me,” he chokes out.

Louis reaches out and pets his hair again, hard. “When I’m hard on you, it’s because of how much I love you,” he says. “I’m hard on you ‘cos it’s my job to prepare you for life. Life is hard. No one out there loves you like me and Liam do. No one out there is gonna cut you slack for your mistakes. We need to be tough with you, ‘cos otherwise we wouldn’t be doing our jobs. And honestly, I used to go too easy on you. I didn’t take your misbehavior seriously enough. Now, you’re getting older, and I have to, ‘cos you won’t be under me roof forever.”

“I’m not gonna do anything bad, Dad,” Patrick says softly. “I promise.”

“I didn’t say you were,” Louis says. “But everyone makes mistakes. Even your older siblings make mistakes. There’s shit I wish I’d prepared them for, in adulthood, but I, y’know. It didn’t occur to me then. So in some ways, yeah, I am a bit harder on you, ‘cos I’ve learned from my mistakes as a parent. Both me and Payno have.”

Patrick is quiet.

“Look, I need you to know, I wouldn’t trade you for the world. I know you’re gonna grow up to be such a clever, ambitious young man, and I can’t wait to see what you’re gonna do in life. I just need you to play ball with us a while longer. I know you boys don’t like school, but you’re so close to being free.”

“Doesn’t feel like it. Feels like forever.”

“Four years,” Louis says. “You can make good use of that time. All me and your dad want is for you to take this talented brain of yours and put it toward somethin’ that can actually help other people. That’s all I ask.”

“I thought I _was_ helping people.”

“Really? Did you really.”

“Yeah! I just let my friends hype me up, and we got carried away. I got excited about the idea of pulling it off. It wasn’t like I did it ‘cos I hate my teachers. I mean, I wrote them the stupid apology letters.”

“Apologizing isn’t stupid.”

“I was frustrated about some stuff at school, and so was everyone I know, and it felt like a way to make things more fair and make money at the same time.”

“Making things more fair rarely ever turns you a profit,” Louis says. “If it does, something’s probably fishy. Life lesson for you.”

Patrick sniffs and wipes at his eyes. “That’s the same thing Mia said.”

“Look, I’m sorry I was gone so long,” Louis says. “It was something I had to do, and I’m glad I did it, but it was a massive sacrifice. I know it was a sacrifice for you boys, too. Thank you for making it. I’m grateful to you for letting me go.”

“I mean, yeah, Dad… it’s not like we could’ve stopped you.”

“Well, I appreciate you not trying,” Louis says, and they both laugh.

“Hey…” Patrick hesitates. “You wanna play a video game together before dinner? Is that allowed?”

Louis smiles at him. “Sure.”

*

After a dinner of pizza with Liam’s salmon and salad on the side (Max stuffs himself full of all three to make both his parents happy, health-nut Sunday eats only salmon and salad, and Mia stumbles home drunk at 9 p.m. while the rest of them are watching TV and eats leftover pizza cold) Louis and Liam retire to their bedroom.

“Paddy seemed perked up at dinner,” Liam says to Louis as they stand at their individual sinks in their 1970s-era bathroom, brushing their teeth.

Louis spits out toothpaste. “Yeah. I think he just needed to hear that I don’t think he’s a bad kid.”

“I told him that!”

“Think he needed to hear it from me, too.”

“He does have a special bond with you,” Liam admits. “Always has.”

“I think he really missed me,” Louis murmurs. “Poor lad. I didn’t know he’d act out like that. I feel guilty.”

“Oh, Tommo, don’t. It’s healthy for them to have a little separation from you, they’re old enough, now. The older kids, y’know, they’re used to spending summers away in England, and things. That’s probably healthier… the twins’ve been more coddled. First time we were ever really away from them was last band tour.”

“Yeah, but the twins ought to be more well-adjusted! Had ‘em at a proper, mature age, in a stable relationship, didn’t accidentally drink or smoke or do coke while I was pregnant wiv ‘em, they ought to be lightyears ahead of me other kids. Ought to have little mustaches and briefcases and families of their own.”

“Who’d you do coke while you were pregnant with?” Liam says.

“Mia. Twice.”

“ _Twice_?”

“I didn’t know I was pregnant!” Louis exclaims. “How would I’ve known? Listen, she’s _fine.”_

Liam laughs. “I mean, look, thing is… I know things are chaotic right now, but if our kids’ problems are all self-inflicted, I think we’re doing fairly well.”

“You’re right, I know.” Louis is quiet for a moment. “So did both the boys miss me like that? Max too?”

Liam nods. “He didn’t show it as much, but yeah. We were all a bit lost without you, honestly.”

“Really?” Louis says, somewhat pleased.

“Speaking of which,” Liam says, “I’ve had a few texts from Niall — he said you declined his FaceTime last night?”

“Oh, God,” Louis groans. “I did. It was in the middle of all the crazy shit, and I forgot to text him back. Poor Niall.”

“He’s just wanted to make sure everything’s alright, and tell you congrats on Amir’s performance.”

“I’ll call him tomorrow for a proper, actual chat, I haven’t talked to him in ages. It’s just been crazy, y’know.” Louis starts rinsing his Sonicare under the sink. “I’d like to get his opinion on this Harry situation, actually.”

“Well, you know what mine is,” Liam says.

Louis sets his brush down beside the sink and sighs, looking over at his husband. “It’s not even so much that I’m angry with him,” he says. “It’s like, I dunno. We’ve been getting on so much better lately, and I was letting myself trust ‘im again, y’know? I mean, I’ve never doubted that he loves me and would be there for me when the chips are down. Even when we weren’t speaking, I knew that, you know I did.”

“I do,” Liam assures him. “I think we all feel that way about each other.”

“It’s more like — someone can love you, and want the best for you, and always be in your life… but not be that considerate to you, or think that highly of you, or put your feelings at much of a priority. Both those things can be true.” Louis takes a sip of water and swishes, then spits it back out sort of violently, like he’s spitting in the street. “And I think we lost trust in each other a long time ago to like each other as much as we loved each other. I’d just started to get that back, y’know? Since we scrapped, we’ve just started taking steps toward, like, the little things. Textin’ each other and shit. Hanging out for no reason. And I let myself believe that part was good again, I let him charm me into that. And he just pulls the rug out from under me.”

“I know, love,” Liam says sympathetically. “I just think he didn’t think what he was doing was a betrayal.”

“But that’s even worse!” Louis cries. “‘Cos how could anyone know me and not know I’d feel betrayed? And if you’re my friend, if you know I’d feel betrayed, even if you thought it was irrational of me, wouldn’t you still try to spare my feelings?”

“I think he thought he was doing what was best in the long run, and you’d forgive him eventually for that reason.”

“Not best for Amir, though. Best for Amir’s _career.”_

“I know. But it’s very, y’know… scorpion and the frog, right?”

“It is, and that’s why I’m hurt.”

“But maybe you have to just accept Harold for who he is. He’s, y’know, he’s got some funny ideas about things, sometimes. I’ve seen Hollywood do worse to a person, y’know? Brought the worst out in Ceci.”

“That’s what Oli thinks, is that it’s ‘cos he’s got Hollywood brain. Like, he didn’t mean any real harm, he just thinks what he did is completely normal.”

“I’m sure he did.”

“I just want the old him back,” Louis mumbles, staring into the sink. “Who he was before… you know. All this shit. That’s what he wants to let happen to Amir, is that same thing that happened to him, and to Zayn. And I couldn’t stand that, like… watching my little boy turn into somebody I barely recognize.”

Liam spits some water and sets his own toothbrush aside, too, then comes over and wraps his arms around Louis, guiding him out of the bathroom and into their bedroom. “Why don’t I take your mind off it for a bit?” he whispers in his ear, then bites it. “‘Cos we can’t solve this tonight, and there’s no point worryin’ right now, and I really, really want to fuck your brains out.”

Louis giggles, getting tingly. He’s really desperate for some Liam. It’s been so long without him, so long without the feeling of home that Liam’s body provides, so long without someone besides himself pleasing him and touching him and playing with him.

“Okay,” he says, letting his muscles relax.

“Okay?” Liam growls, bullying him down into the center of their big bed and spreading out over him. He tugs Louis’ shirt up over his head and tosses it aside, then yanks his joggers and boxers down. “Just _okay_?”

He has a certain glint in his eye. Louis can tell he’s so ready to go right now that he’d bust down a door to fuck him if he had to.

Louis laughs and says, “‘Scuse me. I meant, yes Daddy. Please fuck my brains out, I’ve been waiting for months for you to fuck me brains out.”

“See, I think we’ve played the Daddy thing out. Doesn’t do it for me like it used to. How about yes sir?”

“ _Sir?_ How about you stop babbling and put your fucking ‘ands on me already, _sir_? How ‘bout I call you something that makes you follow orders better, huh? What would that be? How about greedy little cocksucker? Greedy little big-cocked fuck machine? Hmm?”

Liam grins big and leans down to flick his tongue over the tip of Louis’ cock, making him throb. “Alright, roadman. Wanna roll the sex dice, see what position?”

“Payno, if you think I’ve got the energy for anythin’ but missionary you’ve lost your mind.”

Liam gropes at him, rolling Louis’ foreskin down with a very pleasant stroking motion, then running his fingers up and down the shaft with delicious slowness. “Fine with me, but you know I come faster when I’m allowed to kiss you.”

“I do know that, it’s cute. You gonna stop teasing me and suck me off or what?”

Liam flicks his thumbs over his hips, then stretches low over him. “Mmm, yeah. I’m gonna choke on you, and then I’m gonna make you scream.”

Louis likes to hear this. They don’t have to worry about being heard tonight — the kids are all out back, enjoying the late summer night. The two of them excused themselves off to bed early on the half-lie that Louis is jetlagged and Liam had too much to drink at dinner, but neither of them are all that sleepy. They’re just desperate to fuck like bunnies.

Liam starts blowing him like he’s been on a desert island for the last three months, starving for dick. He looks the part: bearded, sort of unkempt, a bit crazy in the eyes. Louis knows it’s not entirely healthy of them, but he loves that Liam could barely manage in his absence, he loves how much he craves Louis’ smell and touch and physical presence. And Louis feels the same way. He laid awake some nights longing for exactly this, these strong hands digging marks into his thighs, this soft mouth licking his cock and bollocks, these blazing dark eyes boring a hole in him, the sound of his voice without a phone between them.

Liam dutifully sucks and licks and massages Louis until he comes, groaning, his fingernails digging into Liam’s shoulder. Then he spits Louis’ come wetly into his hand and starts pushing his sticky fingers inside him.

“Oh,” Louis moans happily. “You’re fuckin’ disgusting. That’s so gross. Put my own come in me.”

“It’s efficient,” Liam says. His voice is hoarse; he took Louis pretty deep. “Like using the whole buffalo. Wait, hang on — I can’t believe I’ve never thought to ask this, but could you have gotten yourself pregnant doing this, back when you still could? Like lizards do?”

Louis laughs. “Nah, my body recognizes me own sperm, or wotever. Trust me, that’s like the one thing I remember from sex ed.”

“That explains a lot.”

“Fuck off.” He shivers with pleasure as Liam fingers him harder. His spent cock throbs uselessly. “You’re gonna come so fast, aren’t you,” he teases, his breath hitching.

“No doubt, mate. Enjoy it while you can.”

Louis laughs.

“Short ride, big impact,” Liam jokes. “Like a drop tower.”

“Oh, a _drop_ tower, huh?”

Liam leans over him and starts kissing him in that nasty way they like to kiss: sloppy tongues, neck-sucking, biting and obscene noises. He nudges his cock at Louis’ arsehole, and Louis can tell he’s rock hard. Louis wraps his legs around him, digging his heels into Liam’s calves, begging him breathily for his dick, whining the way he knows Liam likes to hear.

Not quite a drop tower, but it is very good. Liam edges him a little, pulling out of him before ramming back in, giving him all the little extras he likes — hair-pulling, nipple-flicking, arse-squeezing. He teases Louis until Louis is moaning and crying out. He curses Liam, tells him he’s a rude, nasty fucker, and Liam just laughs and fucks him harder.

It can’t have been more than eight minutes before Liam shudders and groans, then wraps his arms around Louis so tight it’s like he’s a boa constrictor. He lets out one long, happy sigh, and Louis kisses him on the cheek.

“Feel better?” he murmurs. “I do.”

“I feel great,” Liam mumbles. “I could sleep now, honestly.”

“Sounds fine to me. You’re gonna have to let me up to shower, though.”

Liam grips him tighter. “No.”

Louis laughs. Truthfully, he doesn’t want to get up, either. He could lie here forever in this stinky, wonderful pile of heat. Liam’s heartbeat against him, pounding from beneath his sweaty skin and hairy chest, is Louis’ favorite feeling in the world.

“That’s fine,” he murmurs. “Like to warm your cock a while, anyway.”

“Shit yeah. Warm away.”

Louis pets Liam’s hair, lightly scratching his scalp with his fingernails.

*

Max and Patrick are at a nice age — old enough to actually have a conversation with and tell a dirty joke in front of, but boyish enough that they can get genuine joy out of trying to catch fireflies in jars. Sunday and Mia lie in lounge chairs at the edge of the pool while they watch them do this, gazing out over the expanse of the property’s manicured back acres. Goose chases back and forth between the boys, his tags jingling against his collar.

Max’s voice rings out through the night air: “I got one!” he shouts, skidding to a stop.

Mia squints at her brothers in the darkness. There’s no light pollution out here, so it’s harder to see at night, though the stars and moon glow brilliantly.

Patrick runs pell-mell over to him, slipping in the grass and almost eating shit.

“Don’t fall, dumbasses,” Mia yells at them.

Patrick gives her his middle finger in response as he takes Max’s jar from him to examine the firefly trapped inside. She gives him hers right back.

“Raccoon baby,” she yells at him.

“Midget!” he yells back.

Mia makes a noise of offense while Sunday chuckles. “We’re the same height!”

“No! I’m five six now!” Patrick hollers. “Midget! Toddler!”

“Come arm wrestle me if you’re so tough, bitch,” Mia yells, and he pretends not to hear her.

“Hey,” Sunday says. “D’you think he’s started smoking weed?”

Mia shakes her head. “Nah, I don’t think so.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, ‘cos I told him when he turns sixteen I’ll smoke him out for his first time, but he has to wait ‘til then.”

“Mia,” Sunday says, laughing.

“What? Better he does it with me than with his friends.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You know I’m right.”

“Oh, I have a new Max misspelling for the whiteboard, remind me to put it up,” Sunday says. “This morning he texted me ‘hammy downs’ when he meant hand-me-downs. Like, h-a-m-m-y.”

Mia cracks up. “Ma-ax…”

“I know! Like, is it okay that he can’t spell? He’s his class president.”

“When you’re the president, you can just get other people to spell stuff for you,” Mia says sagely. She’s quiet for a moment, then says, “Hey, remember when we used to make fun of the twins for having together parents?”

Sunday laughs. “They were so little, they had no idea what we were talking about.”

“Right, that one time they were like, but why do you guys all have _divorced_ parents? And Amir was like, because we’re cool big kids, and not stupid little babies. So Max got all upset ‘cos he thought that meant that when you got to a certain age your parents broke up just so you could be cool.”

“Oh my God, yeah, I remember that.”

“And then Amir got in trouble, ‘cos Dad had people over, and Max, like, ran into the living room crying about how he’d give up being cool if it meant Liam wouldn’t have to move out.”

“We were _so_ mean to them. I don’t know why they still like us.”

“They always deserved it, though! Me and Amir weren’t mean to our sisters like that.” Mia pauses and thinks about this. “Well, actually, I was a little mean to the girls. One time I got really tired of them going into my room when I wasn’t there, so I told them a ghost lived in my closet, and Marlena started wetting her bed every night and then climbing in bed with Dad and Harry crying about how the ghost was going to eat her.”

Sunday chokes on a laugh. “Mia!”

“I didn’t think she’d take it that seriously! Toni just laughed! And then she snitched me out when they were like, what fucking ghost?”

Sunday laughs some more, finally tailing off. “I miss being a stupid kid.”

“Me too,” Mia says.

They’re quiet for a moment.

“You notice there’s been a ton of attention on Amir since that show?” Sunday says. “There’s a video that’s going viral, and he was a Twitter moment… I’m back to getting a ton of random follow requests, it’s annoying.”

Mia nods. “Me too.”

“It’s weird.”

“People are just surprised to see he’s actually talented,” Mia says, torn between feeling protective and jealous. “I don’t think him being a musician was on anyone’s radar before. The press loves stories like that, shit about celebrity kids, people eat it up ‘cos it’s a novelty, that’s all.”

“But what if he ends up getting seriously famous? Like, all on his own?”

“He probably won’t,” Mia says. “That’s like a lightning strike, you can’t just will it to happen. It’s not genetic.”

“A lot of famous people have famous parents, though,” Sunday points out.

“But actors or models, usually. I feel like it’s easy to get famous for those as long as you have connections and you’re hot. Music is harder.”

“What if he’s even _kinda_ famous?” she presses.

Mia shrugs. “Then I guess we deal.”

“I guess.” Sunday yawns. “Why am I so tired?”

“You do a lot today?” Mia says. She’s pretty worn out herself, although that’s because she spent eight hours drinking with her teammates, many of whom she doesn’t really like that much.

The day wasn’t all bad, though. Late in the afternoon, she and Katarina went out in the alley behind Catherine’s apartment to smoke weed, and they ended up making out. It didn’t chase away her grief over Aya, but it was nice. Katarina seemed really into her; she pressed her hard up against the brick wall, scuffing her leather jacket.

When they’d smoked the joint to death and silently agreed to head back inside, Katarina said to Mia in her thick Russian accent, “It will be okay, sad girl.”

Mia walked behind her down the alley, so she could hide the fact that her eyes were brimming with drunken tears.

“Nah, I barely did anything,” Sunday says. “Just worked with my horses. Maybe there’s something in the air.”

“Like what?”

“Whatever made the dads go to bed early.”

Mia laughs. “Sunday… come on.”

Sunday laughs too, looking over at her. “What now?”

“They didn’t go to bed. They went to go, y’know.”

“Oh, ew!”

“Yeah.” Mia gets up, stumbling a little. She’s still tipsy. “You wanna swim?”

“In our clothes?” Sunday says, shutting her watch off and looking up at Mia.

“Why not?” Mia’s in a sports bra, anyway, and she guesses Sunday is too, because she almost always is. She whips her shirt off and tosses it over her shoulder as she walks away.

Sunday does get up and follow her, of course. Mia smiles at the sound of her footsteps on the stonework.

The lighted, heated pool is surrounded by a typically Californian oasis — little waterfalls trickling from outcroppings of tan, flat rock features that the boys like to cannonball off of, with a cabana that’s rimmed by manzanitas and strawberry trees to afford it privacy from the prying eyes of literally no one.

The twins must have noticed that they were headed toward the pool, because right after Mia jumps in and resurfaces, she sees Max and Patrick sauntering up and tossing their own shirts aside. They teeter at the edge in their basketball shorts. Patrick reaches out to push Max in, but he anticipates this and dances away. Goose, disturbed by their rambunctiousness, slinks away with his ears pinned. Mia beckons him to jump in, and he does, his silky mahogany coat clinging wetly to him as he swims in circles.

“Guys, it’s ten,” Sunday says to the boys. “You should be going to bed.”

Mia leans down to give the dog a wet kiss on the head, enjoying Sunday acting parental in her stead.

“Why?” Patrick challenges. “I don’t have school tomorrow.”

“That’s even more reason to go to bed,” Sunday says. “You’re not on vacation. You’re in, like, punishment jail.”

“I am _not_ ,” Patrick cries, then takes this moment of distraction as an opportunity to push Max in the pool.

Max breaks through the surface of the water crying, “Hey!”

Mia swims over to him, laughing, and tries to dunk him; he fights her off and hits her on the head with a giant inflatable donut.

“Girls, can you put your shirts back on?” Patrick says. “You’re upsetting us.”

“I was about to say the same thing to you,” Mia says, grinning. “You’re literally the scrawniest two-sport athlete I’ve ever seen.”

“We’ll see how scrawny I am when I drop an elbow on you,” Patrick says, brandishing his arm. “Get ready.”

“Go ahead and try, I dare you.”

Patrick feints like he’s going to fling himself in her direction before daintily cannonballing in instead, and Sunday follows him in. They take turns splashing and shooting water guns at each other until agreeing to a game of Marco Polo; this eventually gets so loud that Louis opens a bedroom window and shouts down at them, “KIDS! IT’S TEN FOOKIN’ THIRTY!”

They all crack up laughing.

MALIBU, AUGUST 15, 2039

Harry really buried the lede when it came to these meetings he set up. Amir thought “some meetings over the next few days” implied a casual schedule, but he’s woken by Harry’s assistant first on Monday, 8 a.m. sharp. She comes into his bedroom with a transparent tablet and clears her throat until he stirs.

“Good morning Amir,” Chelsea chirps. “How did you sleep?”

He cracks one eye open and says, “Rrrmm.”

She shows him the tablet, which is incomprehensible to his bleary eyes. “Can you take a look at the itinerary Harry’s prepared for you, and go ahead and approve it for me? He had to rush off to a morning meeting with Gucci’s corporate office to discuss the fall campaign, but he wants you to meet him over at Chiara Dal Lago’s design studio in Beverly Hills. Actually, you’ll head over there first and get fitted, then she’ll pull some pieces for Harry to come by and review.”

Amir blinks to clear his vision. 10 A.M. - MEET WITH CHIARA is the first item on the list.

“After which,” Chelsea says, “Harry will accompany you to a media training session. I’ll send the full itinerary to your phone, but you only have to get to Chiara’s studio by yourself, and then Harry will handle you for the rest of the day. Again, he sends his apologies that he had to run off.”

“That’s all, uh, fine,” Amir says, barely processing what she said. “Approved, I mean. Can I get dressed?”

“Of course,” Chelsea says, shooting him a smile. “I’ll leave you to it.”

*

Amir heads downstairs for cereal and catches the girls on their way out the door to camp with the nanny, Blair. He waves goodbye to them and finds Zayn in the kitchen, drinking tea and eating nothing.

“How you feeling?” Amir says to him, going to one of the cabinets for cereal. Their kitchen is pretty much the opposite of Liam and Louis’ — it’s all Sub-Zero colors, chilly whites and gleaming silvers. He grabs some Reese’s Puffs and brings them to the island, where chilled milk and bowls are already waiting.

“Loads better, actually,” Zayn says.

“Not better enough to eat?” Amir prods him.

He motions at his throat. “Still scratchy.”

“Ri-ight.”

“So Harry’s remaking you, today?” Zayn says, swiftly changing the subject.

“Yeah, he’s got all sorts of plans to civilize me.”

“Don’t let ‘em erase your style, alright? Don’t go corporate on me.”

“Never.” Amir pauses. “Dads and Harry are fighting about that a little, I think.”

“A little?” Zayn laughs. “You want my advice? Don’t try to get between the two of them on anythin’. I don’t care if they’ve got pistols on each other, just keep your mouth shut, don’t take a side.”

“Is that what _you_ do? Jesus, Dad.”

“It’s what I’ve learned to do, yeah! Otherwise I’m the one gettin’ shot at! Look, it’s like where I grew up, y’know? You see some guys whacking the shit out of another one in an alley, what are you gonna do, get involved and get your own face kicked in? Or trying to break up a fight between your sisters. You poke your head out, they start misdirecting that anger at you. Nah, you keep quiet, and they’ll settle this eventually. It’s a territory thing.”

“I just thought they were getting along better lately.”

Zayn shrugs. “Comes and goes,” he says, his voice cracking.

They sit there in silence for a moment while Amir eats his cereal and Zayn sips at his tea.

“Hey,” Amir says. “Did I see that Marlena and Toni were like, taking bacon with them to eat in the car?”

Zayn considers this for a moment, then nods. “Yeah, Blair made bacon.”

“Bacon bacon,” Amir repeats. “Not, like, turkey bacon?”

Zayn inhales and drums his fingers on the icy white marble of the island. “So,” he says, “guess you’d find this out sooner or later. We’re sort of easing up on the more rigid aspects of religion.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, they’re not going to services, right now,” Zayn says. “We’re letting them take a bit of a break.”

“A break?”

“Yeah.”

“Dad!”

Zayn shrugs. “What?”

“You’re okay with that?”

“Yeah, I gave them the choice,” he says, sipping his tea.

“It wasn’t a choice for me and Mia,” Amir says. “It was an expectation. It _is_ an expectation.”

“Different situation,” Zayn says, running his hand through his hair. “They’re different kids, they’re being raised differently. You know, your dad didn’t care at all about your religious upbringing, but Harry wants a say.”

“I don’t believe you that he didn’t care at _all_.”

Zayn shrugs. “Well, he got a bit shirty about me wantin’ you circumcised, he didn’t want you cut, but that was the only time I can remember. And obviously I got my way on that in the end.”

Amir chokes on his cereal. “Please.”

“You asked! But yeah, on most things, he didn’t ‘ave an opinion.”

“And, what, Harry does?”

“Harry, er, he feels differently. I think the point of religion’s to give a structure to your life, and he thinks it’s more about… tapping into the universe or whatever. So. We’ve had some long talks about that, and we’re trying to compromise.”

“What if we were Catholic? Would he still have an issue?”

“Yeah, absolutely! Probably even moreso. It ain’t about _that._ ”

Amir fixes him with a look.

“Look, this is a very spiritual household,” Zayn says, his voice getting creaky. He takes a moment to wheeze a bit, and Amir continues the look.

“What does _spiritual_ even mean?” he says.

Zayn lets out a sigh. “I’m actually surprised you’re this narked about this. You’ve always been on the fence about if you even think Allah is real.”

“This isn’t about me!”

“I think whether or not you actually consider yourself religious as an adult is relevant to the discussion,” Zayn challenges. “Maybe you would, if I’d given you the space to come toward it on your own.”

“Dad! You know I consider myself Muslim!”

“Culturally, moreso,” Zayn says. “So how’s that different from what I’m talking about?”

“Because it’s up to me to say that. That’s my right, to get a religious education and say I don’t agree with all of it. But you’re talking about just skipping that part entirely.”

“I didn’t say that,” Zayn says. “I didn’t say this was the new permanent state of things.”

“But what’s wrong with how I was raised? Why is that wrong, suddenly?”

“Absolutely nothing! I just wish you got more comfort from it than you do. Like, existentially. I want that for the girls.”

“I was never going to have any existential comfort from anything, that's just not who I am, but there’s more to it than that! It’s a shared history, and stuff. Just ‘cos I struggle with the idea of blind faith doesn’t mean me participating in the religion is any less valuable. Christ. I can’t believe you’d let Harry drive Islam out of your house for the sake of his woo woo Hollywood shit.”

“Hey,” Zayn barks. “You show me and your stepfather some respect.”

Amir falls quiet, his face burning. He didn’t mean to mouth off like that, but he’s drowning in all his little-boy hurts right now, all those ancient fears and wounds he has about Zayn going off and making a new family, a better family, a family that’s foreign to him and doesn’t have room for him. He’s mostly gotten over this, and he loves the girls and Harry, but sometimes it comes up like bile. Plus he’s feeling so weird about Harry, these last few days — like the scales of childish hero worship have fallen from his eyes, and he’s finally seeing the grotesque building blocks of Harry’s shimmering movie star glamour.

“I didn’t _let_ Harry do anything, and the culture’s not going anywhere,” Zayn says, sounding more sympathetic than angry now. “I completely get why you’d be concerned, I do. But we’re celebrating all our holidays, all that, nothing’s changed.”

“Are you?”

“Of course! You know Harry, he’s a fiend for Eid. It’s just some rules that are being put aside for now, the organized bit. I mean, it’s not as if I’ve ever followed Islam to the letter to begin with. We have a dog. Dog gets on the fookin’ furniture.” He drums his fingers on the table. “ _I_ didn’t want the dog on the fookin’ furniture. But I don’t see you yellin’ at me about that, and you’re yellin’ at me about bacon?”

“Does Mia know you stopped taking them to services?” Amir says, though he knows she doesn’t. She would have told him immediately.

“No,” Zayn says. “Quite frankly, I haven’t been in the mood to get hollered at about it, ‘cos, y’know, she’s probably more religious than either you or me.”

Amir laughs. “It’s ‘cos she’s an athlete.”

“Yeah, I think you’re onto something with that. Listen, I’ll tell her myself, alright? And don’t be texting about this to your cousins either.”

“Who says I was going to?”

“I know you’ve got that big cousin group chat, and you text them all my private business and that’s how my sisters find out shit about me that I don’t want them to know.”

“Dad, come on. That makes it sound like you think you’ve got something to hide.”

“I’m not hiding anything,” Zayn says. “It just sounds like a bigger change than it is, which is why I didn’t say anything.”

“It just doesn’t feel fair. I know it wasn’t every single week, but me and Mia went to Friday prayers for, what, a decade? I dropped an afternoon class in high school so I could go!”

“Yeah, and then you stopped going when I left for France, just to get back at me,” Zayn says, raising his eyebrows at him.

“I was a dumb kid. I was mad and hurt, and I didn’t want to go without you.”

“Exactly, so you were only going for me to begin with, not for your own spiritual health. And if I’d given you the option at eleven, you probably would’ve stopped goin’ then too.”

“When I was eleven, I would’ve stopped going to school if you gave me the option! I would’ve stopped eating anything that wasn’t pizza rolls!”

“You know, partly it was something I did with you two just ‘cos Friday was one of the only full days I got wiv you,” Zayn says. “I wouldn’t’ve started taking you that young if it weren’t for the divorce, ‘cos I know sitting still and praying’s tough for wee kids. But I wanted to make the most of our time together, give you some permanent structure in your life that was still there when we were apart.”

“I know, Dad...”

“And things aren’t the same as they were when you were a kid. Time’s passed, love. You know our old imam retired, and it’s been hard to find somebody I like as much as I did him. When I took them last December, we got this crazy talk on how the world’s dangerous and full of evil, you know that isn’t how I want my kids to feel about shit. That was honestly what kicked this off, not anything Harry did. If I bring the girls into that space, I want it to be a place of peace and comfort. Is it that for you?”

“Yeah!”

“Do you still pray?”

“Sometimes.”

“How long’s it been since you went to a mosque?”

“I used to go in New York,” Amir retorts. “When I was homesick.”

He also occasionally went to a Latin mass, because he loves the sound of Latin, but Zayn doesn’t need to know about that.

“Good, I’m glad,” Zayn says, smiling. “I love that I share that with you and Yasmeen, alright? I’m happy you’ve got a place for it in your life. The girls will too, in time. I’m not worried.”

Amir shakes his head. “Alright. Fine.”

Zayn reaches out and strokes his head, ruffling his hair. “I know you two have been a bit concerned about me, ever since I went back to rehab,” he says.

“That’s not what this is about.“

“You sure?” Zayn clears his throat. “Sometimes I think you look at me and you see this, y’know, feeble old fuckup that you ‘ave to worry about. Your sister practically admitted to it the other day.”

“No,” Amir exclaims. “Dad, I swear, that’s not what this is about.”

“Well, then, can you trust that I’ve got enough grit to still be making appropriate decisions for my family? And I might have changed my mind on a few parts of parenting since raising you?”

“You’re still raising me,” Amir mumbles, hurt.

“No,” Zayn says, his eyes twinkling. “You’re grown. You’re your own person, now, a married man.”

“I barely feel like that. I feel like a kid, still.”

“That’ll pass,” Zayn says.

“You sure?”

“I promise. And if you want a happy marriage, you’ve got to _let_ it pass. You’ve got to accept that you’re driving your own life, no one else.”

Amir doesn’t have anything to say to this, so he goes back to eating his cereal.

“You know,” he says, “it doesn’t make me a bad Muslim just ‘cos I have a lot of questions.”

“Oh, love, I never said you were a bad Muslim. But you don’t just have questions, you have doubts.”

“Is having doubts so bad? Didn’t Mohammed have doubts?”

Zayn shrugs. Amir looks down, carving a soggy Reeses Puff in half with his spoon.

“You think about things so hard,” Zayn says. “Always have.”

“Maybe other people don’t think about things hard enough,” Amir says mulishly.

BEVERLY HILLS, AUGUST 15, 2039

Chiara’s studio is on the fourth floor of a sleek, circular office building on the corner of Wilshire. Amir dresses fairly casual, since he figures they’ll be making him take it all off anyway, then immediately feels childish when he walks into the lobby and is surrounded by a throng of professionals in formal businesswear, heading through turnstiles to the elevator bank.

“I have a ten o’clock?” he says hesitantly to the front desk guard. “With Chiara — uh. Chiara… Lhasa Apso… something. Fourth floor?”

“Okay,” the guard says. “Take a seat, her assistant will come get you.”

“Thanks.”

The assistant is in the same mold as Harry’s Chelsea — a coiffed young white woman who has a look on her face like she's responsible for organizing Armageddon. She introduces herself as Polly and implores Amir, “Walk quickly, please, Chiara hates to be kept waiting.”

“I’m on time,” Amir protests.

“On time is late,” Polly helpfully informs him.

“Well,” Amir says, and makes a jerking off gesture when she turns back around.

The studio is empty of people when they arrive, except for a tiny woman with thick glasses who’s bent over a workbench, studying what looks like sketches. Impossibly tall windows flood the length of the studio with blazing morning light. Amir glances around; he doesn’t see a whole lot of clothes, mostly just workbenches and mannequins.

Polly grabs him by the bicep and practically drags him over to the woman, who only looks up when he’s directly in front of her. She’s deeply tan in a leathery kind of way, with hawkish Italian features.

“Hi,” Amir says.

“Hello,” she says in a thick accent. “I’m Chiara.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m Amir.”

“I know you are.” She peers at him from behind her glasses, then takes them off and squints, pressing a leg of them against her lips. “Hmm. Harry did not mention you were short.”

“‘Scuse me?”

“When he described you, I imagined average height or tall. You are a little short, no?” She stands and comes around the table to him; she’s quite short herself. She reaches up to touch his face, tilting his head to the side with her hand. “Yes, exquisite bone structure. This is a pity. If you were four inches taller, I could make you a model.”

“I’ll get right on that,” Amir says sarcastically.

She doesn’t seem to pick up on this or care about it; just continues to examine him. “Not quite white, hmm? _Boh._ What are you? Are you a Latin?”

“Am I _a Latin_?” Amir exclaims.

“This is Zayn’s son,” Polly whispers hastily. “That’s why Harry brought him in? This is his stepson.”

“Oh,” she says, again unmoved. “Yes, I see the resemblance. I didn’t realize Zayn had older children... I’ve only seen him with his little daughters. Now Marlena, there’s a beauty. I think she’ll be quite tall.”

“She probably will be,” Amir says. Marlena can be six foot fifty for all he cares — he just wants to go home and smoke weed.

“I have my eye on her, certainly.”

At this, Amir feels a little lurch of protectiveness over his sister. Marlena is gangly like Harry, it’s true, though she resembles Zayn more than she used to, and she’s starting to get more olive, like Amir. Her hair is a thick dark sheet, even straighter than Mia’s, and as she’s gotten taller she’s become more obviously slim and pointed. She’s an assemblage of right angles and straight lines, down to her nose, which shares an even slant with Zayn and Amir’s.

Lately everyone points out how pretty she is, even when they’re just walking down the street, and she’s becoming Harry’s show pony, just like Amir is Zayn’s. He thinks she kind of gets a raw deal compared to Toni, who Harry is more relaxed with. Louis’ opinion on this is that Harry is neurotic about Marlena because of all his miscarriages, and he feels more comfortable in his love for Toni, since she isn’t biologically his. Amir doesn’t know if he’s right about that, but it makes sense.

Marlena’s always been less self-assured than Toni, less well-adjusted. She had a stutter when she first started talking, and Toni just started speaking for her a lot of the time. Mia and Amir got in the habit of doing the same, and this went on until she was almost four years old and the problem vanished on its own. But even now, she sometimes seems unsure of her own voice.

“Polly,” Chiara says, “has he been measured?”

“Not yet.”

“I’ll do it myself.”

Polly turns on her heel and immediately walks off, like she’s been dismissed.

Chiara strips Amir’s denim jacket off of him, leaving him in a black tee and black skinny jeans. “Shirt off, and pants too.”

He obliges, even though it’s cold in here, then stands there apprehensively in boxers. She starts wrapping a measuring tape around every part of his body, marking numbers down by speaking them aloud into her watch with every go.

“Inseam thirty-one,” she intones when she finally gets down to his feet, then straightens up. “Alright. Have a seat. I will pull appropriate pieces.”

She strides away, toward whatever side office Polly disappeared into. Amir snatches up his clothes, pulling his shirt back on so he doesn’t freeze and perching atop one of the tables to tap off a frantic text to Zayn and Mia. _this designer harry set me up with is fucking crazy_

 _ha poor lad,_ Zayn replies. _that’s just what fashions like_

 _Yeah isn’t she with gucci?_ Mia says. _they’re pretty crazy at adidas, i’m guessing gucci is like 90x worse_

 _i’m never doing this again,_ Amir says. _i’ll buy all my clothes at target_

 _That’s the biz, luv_ , Zayn says.

_she asked me if i was “a latin”_

Mia double laugh reacts to this. _holy shit_

 _is it the italian bird?_ Zayn says. _Italians are very racist. Tell her fuck off and go make you a cappuccino_

 _way to take the high road dad_ , Mia says.

Zayn sends the angel emoji in response.

*

A half hour later, after Chiara has laid out about fifty pieces and made Amir try on six different outfits, Harry comes to his rescue. The last time he can remember being this happy to see his stepfather was when he was eleven and Harry yanked him sideways out of a riptide while they were swimming at Venice Beach.

Harry examines the clothes she’s pulled, one hand to his mouth and its elbow clasped in his other palm, walking from table to table in silence. He looks especially authoritative today, with his hair smoothed back and the little shadow of a mustache on his lip, like he’s Clark Gable. Chiara eyes him warily, her hands on her hips.

“No,” he finally says. “These aren’t right. This…” He gestures toward one pairing, which Amir had liked — very fitted pants and a structured red jacket. “This is the sort of thing I’m looking for. We aren’t trying to drown him in statement pieces, he’s not built for that… we’re just trying to draw the eye to him.”

Chiara doesn’t visibly react to this.

“Amir?” Harry says. “What do you think? D’you agree, disagree?”

“Uh.” Amir clears his throat. “Yeah. I agree. I like that outfit, but not the other stuff so much.”

“So,” Harry says to Chiara, “please pull about twenty more pieces like that, please? And I’ll be by tomorrow to take another look.”

“Certainly, Mr Styles. We will be ready. _Farò in modo di non fare questo sbaglio di nuov_ o, _mio caro._ ”

He comes over to her and extends his hand to take hers, then kisses it. “ _Grazie per la pazienza_.”

“ _Di niente.”_

Harry winks at her and flashes a dimple. “Amir? We’re off to your next meeting.”

Amir lies to Chiara that it was nice meeting her, then grabs his jacket and hurries after Harry.

They’re in the elevator before Amir finds the balls to ask the question that’s on his mind. “Harry?”

“Yes,” Harry says. He’s looking down at his watch, his brow knit, his finger scrolling frantically upward like he’s missed a lot of texts in a group chat.

“How do you get everyone to do what you want them to?”

Harry laughs. “It’s because I make them so much fucking money,” he whispers, like he’s telling a secret.

“Must be nice,” Amir says. He wants to add, _and how do you get my dad to do whatever you want?_ But he chickens out at the last second.

“Well, that’s what we’re working on for you.”

“Is it?”

The elevator stops and opens onto a small lobby with a bunch of people in it. A middle-aged guy is lingering in front of the doors, holding a portfolio case. “Going up?”

“Down,” Harry says apologetically.

“Ah, shoot, okay.”

Right before the doors close, they hear a woman’s voice exclaim from the background, “Shit, Chris, that was Harry Styles!”

They descend again, laughing at the interruption.

“I don’t want _that,”_ Amir clarifies.

“You’d get used to it.”

“I don’t even like it when people recognize me now, though, and it doesn’t happen constantly.”

“Of course you don’t like it,” Harry says. “Right now, you have all of the drawbacks, with almost none of the perks… and you’ve never known any other reality, either. But we can get you the perks.”

Amir’s quiet for a long moment. “How do you know that designer?” he says. “You guys seemed pretty familiar.”

Harry nods, looking back down at his phone. “Actually, I met Chiara through my ex-husband.”

Amir stays very quiet. This is maybe the third or fourth time he’s ever heard Harry even allude to being previously married.

“I poached her from his Milan fashion house, after we split up,” he says, then smiles. “Convinced her that Gucci could do a lot more for her than he could.”

“Do they?”

He shrugs. “I suppose. She makes more money here, anyway.”

“So it was more of just a fuck you to your ex, then?”

Harry looks at him sharply, like he’s never seen him before, then softens after a moment. “Probably,” he admits, and laughs again.

Amir’s wrist vibrates with a text. He looks down. Evan.

 _can you call me in an hour?_ Evan says. _my sister wants to talk to both of us, to give us advice and stuff_

_fuckkkkkkkkk i can’t. i’m sorry. i’m in these harry meetings all morning. later?_

_later might work, i’ll let you know. rachel’s in most of these crisis meetings they’re having, since she’s on the board, so it’s tough for her to get an opening_

_FUCK sorry :( how are your parents today?_

_Lol idk,_ Evan replies. _dad still isn’t talking to me. mom hasn’t gotten out of bed yet and it’s 2 pm_

_after my next meeting i can do a call. im supposed to have lunch with some consultant but fuck him, it’s fine_

_Nah don’t blow anything off. this isn’t urgent_

_it kind of is_ , Amir types anxiously. _i mean we are married..._

He has a burgeoning irrational fear that Evan is going to let his parents manipulate him into thinking that this was a crazy, terrible idea, and apply for the annulment himself, then ghost Amir once and for all.

 _Handle your career stuff_ , Evan says. _it’s fine_

As they walk out to a waiting town car, Amir squints at Harry in the bright sunlight. “Can I ask you for marriage advice? Is that cool?”

Harry looks surprised, but nods. “Anytime,” he says, opening the backseat door for Amir and beckoning him in.

Amir slides across the bench seat, then waits for Harry to join him and close the door. “Is it ever a good idea to make sacrifices about your career for, uh, whoever you’re married to?”

Harry gives him a long, steady look. “At your age? No.”

“No,” Amir repeats. “Never?”

“Never.”

Amir nods, then wraps his arms around himself and stares down at his lap.

Harry reaches out to touch him on the arm. “You’re special,” he says gently. “You’re a special talent. That requires special sacrifices.”

“What if I want…” Amir swallows. “What if I don’t necessarily know what I want?”

“Don’t think about what you want,” Harry says. “Think about what you’ll regret doing, or not doing, when you get to be my age.” He presses the intercom to the driver and says, “Tom? We’re headed to the Sepulveda address I sent earlier. Thank you.”

The car pulls out into traffic. Amir stares out the tinted window, his head swimming.

MALIBU, AUGUST 16, 2039

On Tuesday, Harry gives Amir the morning off from getting reinvented and goes out on the boat with Zayn. Amir’s media training session went so badly that a few holes have been punched in his schedule by virtue of Harry cancelling the interviews he’d set up for him. “You’re not at all ready,” he said apologetically when they stepped out of the offices of Dodson Media Strategies LLC. “Sorry. I dunno why I thought you were more familiar with how to answer interview questions.”

“Yeah, I don’t know either,” Amir told him. “I still don’t get what I was doing wrong, though.” He had just sat through an hour-long mock-interview, being asked sample questions about his parents, his love life, and music.

“You kept only answering the questions you were asked,” Harry said.

“Well, yeah?”

“I mean you either answered directly, even if all you said was just ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or you didn’t say anything and shrugged.”

“Yeah, if there wasn’t a good way to answer it. Some of those questions were really personal, or fucked up.”

“But you don’t answer the question you’re asked,” Harry explained. “You use every question as an opportunity to answer the question you actually want to answer. That’s the game.”

“Then why even get interviewed? Why not just say stuff on social media?”

“‘Cos the interviewer’s in on the game with you. You need what looks like an opponent, or no one believes you.”

Amir was quiet.

“And by the way, you don’t ask that many questions in interviews,” Harry said with a smile. “It was polite of you to ask the strategists about themselves, but you have to remember, an interview’s not a normal conversation.”

“Why couldn’t it be, though?”

“‘Cos it just isn’t.”

So that morning, when he’d been tentatively scheduled to chat with Kelly And Karson In The Morning over at KIIS-FM, instead Amir stays home with the girls. He brings his Playstation 8 downstairs so they can play some of the violent games that Harry and Zayn refuse to buy the girls for their own consoles.

“Oh, this _sucks,_ ” Toni says delightedly, when her character is killed by zombie cult members for the fourth time in ten minutes. “How do I get out of here?”

“I haven’t even gotten out of the cryogenics chamber yet,” Marlena says with a sad look. “I keep getting killed by that dog.”

“Want some help?” Amir says, reaching his hands out toward each of them. Marlena immediately hands him her controller, but Toni yanks hers out of reach and slides off the couch to sit on the floor.

“No,” Toni says. “I’m gonna get it. I’m getting better every time.”

“It’s painful to watch, though,” Amir says, taking control of Marlena’s character and starting to easily whack his way through the room she was in. “Want me to lower the difficulty?”

“Yes,” Marlena says, while Toni cries, “No!”

“Alright, alright.”

Kip lifts his head and barks twice at nothing. Amir shushes him. He doesn’t think anything of it — terriers are annoying like that.

“Ooh, wait, there’s a machete in the break room?” Toni says, tapping R1 to pick it up. “That changes everything.”

“You guys want me to grab the headsets, at least? It’s easier on VR.”

“God, no,” Marlena says. “That would be way too much.”

Amir is more than happy to mindlessly whack his way through zombie dogs and people. He’d had a pretty shitty phone call with Evan that morning. It wasn’t like Evan said anything wrong, per se — it was more about what he didn’t say than what he did. He sounded completely distracted, and he talked to Amir more like he did when they were just bros.

“Do you regret us getting married?” Amir said, painedly, when their small talk had petered off.

“No, no,” Evan said. “Dude, not at all. It’s just — you don’t know what it’s like over here. I can’t talk or think about anything besides this takeover. I’m having to like, put on suits and walk behind my dad for photo ops, and shit. It’s like the fucking Twilight Zone. I’m just in a weird place.”

“A place where I'm not even in your head.”

“No, Amir! You’re just not _here_! You know how I am!”

“Right, I forgot, you can only think about what’s right in front of your face. Are you a toddler?”

Evan met this with a very chilly silence.

“I’m just saying,” Amir added apologetically. “We don’t stop being married just ‘cos your family is insane.”

“Maybe if you were here to support me, it’d be different.”

“But you keep telling me not to come out! You keep saying I shouldn’t leave!”

“‘Cos you shouldn’t!”

“So why don’t you come out _here_? I miss you. I want to see you. We didn’t get to have a honeymoon or anything.”

“I know,” Evan said, sounding pained. “I just can’t, yet.”

“Why not? You’ve given them enough of your time. Your dad is refusing to _talk_ to you, and you’re willing to act like his puppet?”

“I’m not a _puppet_!”

“Stop acting like one, then!”

“Look, I gotta go,” Evan said.

Amir didn’t even say bye, he just hung up on him.

He and Toni have broken out of the cultist cloning facility and made it halfway down a country road when, in real life, the chandelier above them starts shaking. They all slowly look up at it, and then the walls begin to tremble.

“Earthquake,” Amir says nervously. “Somebody grab Kip —“

Toni snatches the dog into her arms as light fixtures begin rattling, paintings start shaking on the walls, and books start tumbling off of the bookshelves that create a false edge around the open-plan living room. Amir looks around frantically. There are no real doorways in this fucking house, why are there no doorways?

Amir grabs both of the girls by their arms and pushes them forward, speeding toward the dining room, where there’s a big sturdy table to shelter under. A moment after them, the chandelier crashes onto the floor where they just were, with a boom and shatter like a bomb going off. One of the girls screams.

Throughout the house, he can hear more fragile objects crashing to the floor, and plate glass shattering. They’re out of time — they’re going to have to shelter where they are. Amir drags Marlena and Toni to the edge of the step down out of the living room, then brings their heads to his chest and bends over them, shielding them and Kip. Books continue to fall, including from the bookshelf to his left, which tips over beside them and crashes to the floor, showering them in hardbacks and vinyls. They smack painfully off of Amir’s arms and back, but he doesn’t think any of them hit the girls.

Moments later, the house stops swaying. Amir doesn’t hear any more crashing. He lifts his head.

“You guys okay?” he says, his voice trembly.

“Yeah,” Marlena says.

“Yeah,” Toni agrees. The dog leaps out of her arms and starts barking and dancing in circles.

There’s a pain in Amir’s arm that isn’t going away. He looks down and sees a large shard of glass from the chandelier sticking out of it, and blood trickling down over his elbow. For a moment he feels like he might pass out.

“Um,” he says. “Can one of you… can someone pull that out of my arm? Please?”

Marlena, who the injured arm is wrapped around, looks down at it. She yelps and covers her eyes. “Amir!”

“I’ll do it,” Toni says gamely, although she looks shaken, and she’s refusing to look at his arm. “Should I go get a Band-Aid first?”

“Yes. Yeah.” He stares determinedly at the floor. “Grab, uh. Like. Gauze, and spray.”

She runs upstairs. He’s still sitting on the step with Marlena when the front door bangs shut, and they hear Zayn yelling in a panic: “OI! KIDS!”

“We’re here!” Amir yells back. “We’re okay!”

A moment later, the two of them bolt out around the corner, their faces ashen. Marlena leaps up and runs to hug them, and they both wrap their arms around her, holding her tight. Kip sits at Harry’s feet, frantically wagging his tail.

“Where’s Toni?” Harry demands, as Zayn looks around wildly for her.

“She’s upstairs getting me a bandage,” Amir says, indicating his bicep with his good arm.

Zayn looks down at the glass sticking out of him, then cries out in unhappy shock. “Sonny,” he says, coming and sitting down beside him where Marlena was, ruffling his hair and kissing him on the head. “Fuck, what happened?”

“A bunch of your stupid, unsecured shit fell down,” Amir says. Now he’s genuinely angry. “Including your massive stupid chandelier, which almost killed all three of us.”

“Amir,” Zayn says, flashing his eyes at him.

“The girls could’ve been hurt, Dad! Okay?”

Zayn is silent.

“Toni shouldn’t even be upstairs,” Harry says, sounding unusually panicky. “There’ll be aftershocks... TONI? TONI!”

“It’s alright, she’s okay,” Zayn reassures him. 

There’s a beat, and they hear a distant, tiny voice yell, “ONE SEC! HOLD ON!”

Harry exhales, visibly relieved. “Any other injuries?” he says to Amir. “Anything else hit you, or hit the girls?”

“I got hit by stuff,” Amir says. “Books, mostly.”

“You okay?”

“I’m fine. Why do you have so many books, anyway? I never see you guys reading physical, paper books.”

“We read books,” Zayn says. “You sure you’re alright, love?”

Amir kicks impudently at a fallen copy of _On Photography_. He’s suddenly angry at Harry, and he can’t even figure out why, but the entire house and all the shit in it feels like a repugnant extension of him right now. “Yeah.”

“Amir protected us,” Marlena says quietly. “He covered us while all the books fell, and stuff. I didn’t get hit by anything, and I don’t think Toni did either.”

Harry looks stricken, and Zayn sighs in a fatherly way before reaching up to stroke Amir’s hair. Amir sits there in grim silence, trying to ignore the pain in his bicep.

“Anything hit you in the head?” Zayn asks him.

“No, nothing hit me in the head. Can you take a picture of my arm? I want to send it to Mia.”

Zayn chokes out a laugh and makes a face, but after a moment, he takes out his phone and obliges.

Toni comes back down the stairs and comes over to them, silently offering antibiotic spray, gauze and bandages to Zayn, who takes them, then grabs her hands and squeezes them very hard.

“You okay, _meri jaan_?” he says.

Toni nods. “Wait, how did you guys get back so fast?”

“We were almost home when it started,” Harry says, beckoning Toni over to him and wrapping an arm around her as well, kissing her on the head. “We could feel it even from the car. Must’ve been a big, close one.” Zayn makes a gesture in Amir’s peripheral vision, and Harry glances at him for a second, then makes eye contact with Amir. “Hey, Amir?”

“Yeah?”

He taps his earlobe. “Tell me, what color’s my earring?”

“What color’s your —?” Amir squints at him, and as he does, he feels a sharp pain in his arm. “Ahh! Fuck!”

“Sorry, sorry,” Zayn says. “Thought it might hurt a bit less if you were distracted.”

He presses some gauze hard against Amir’s arm where the glass had been, then shows him the shard. It’s a long, skinny isosceles triangle, with his blood on the point of it. Amir grows lightheaded again, this time worse than before; it works itself up from the base of his spine until it hits his brain, and then the world vanishes in a black tunnel.

“I’m gonna faint,” he says to Zayn, a second before it happens. He hasn’t fainted since he was fourteen, but there he goes, swooning into his dad’s arms. One of the girls gasps.

He comes to a moment later, his vision swimming with black spots. Zayn is holding him tight, patting him on the back and saying his name.

“I’m up,” Amir mumbles.

“Alright there?” Zayn says gruffly. “Sorry. Shouldn’t’ve made you look at that.”

He continues to rub Amir’s back and stroke his hair, telling him in a soft voice that everything’s alright. Amir clings to him for a long moment, clutching his dad’s sleeve hard in one fist, not wanting to be let go of.

Marlena, Toni and Harry are all staring with worry at Amir, their eyes wide (Harry and Marlena’s almost comically so).

“Is he okay?” Toni says, sounding upset.

“Oh, ‘e’s fine,” Zayn assures her. “Nothing unusual. He used to be a bit of a fainter when he was younger.”

“Thanks,” Amir complains.

“It’s not an insult! It’s just you were fuckin’ anemic, ‘cos you never ate food.” Zayn keeps a square of gauze pressed to the wound and starts wrapping more gauze around his bicep, tightening the pressure. “I’ll take you to hospital if this keeps bleeding. Keep an eye on it.”

Marlena is still clinging anxiously to Harry. Toni looks calmer, though rattled.

“Upstairs is really bad,” she says to no one in particular. “The glass in the shower in your guys’s bathroom shattered.”

“You stay out of there, then,” Zayn says sternly.

“I did. I went in me and Marlena’s medicine cabinet instead.”

“Good.”

Harry reaches up to pet Toni’s head, gently stroking her freshly braided hair. “I’ll go get you some water,” he says to Amir.

“Thanks,” Amir says.

“Or something a bit stronger, if you like,” he jokes.

“Water’s good.”

When Harry traipses off toward the kitchen, carefully avoiding fallen books and shattered glass, the girls come over to hug Amir.

“Hi,” Amir says, surprised, gingerly wrapping his arms around both of them. “I’m okay, guys, I promise.”

“Thanks, Amir,” Marlena says, squeezing him.

Toni kisses him on the cheek. “You’re our favorite big brother.”

Everyone chuckles at this.

*

News gets around pretty fast about the earthquake — a 6.2 whopper with an epicenter in Malibu Beach, which leaves Amir surprised that the entire house didn’t just slide on down the hill into the ocean — and Louis, when he calls to make sure everyone’s okay, invites them to go stay at his Beverly Hills place instead of getting a hotel.

“It’s bare, not a lot of shit on the walls or ceilings, and earthquakes don’t seem to hit that neighborhood too hard,” he says on speakerphone with Zayn. “You ought to be fine in the aftershocks.”

Evan calls Amir twice while he’s changing his clothes, then texts him, _i just saw there was a big quake, you okay??_ Amir writes back _im fine. we’re all fine_ and doesn’t say anything else. He’s too pissed. He could have died, crushed to death by a fucking bookcase, and the last thing his husband would have said to him was, “Look, I gotta go.”

Once they’re all settled in Louis and Liam’s _pied-à-terre,_ Amir heads out to his therapy appointment. He’d almost totally forgotten about it until an alarm went off on his watch. He called the place to make sure they’re still open, but they’re out in Reseda and apparently barely felt anything. “Come on down!” the receptionist said cheerfully. “A stapler fell off my desk, but that’s it!”

In the Uber over, Amir texts Mia the gruesome picture of his arm.

 _ughhhhhh dickhead i didnt actually need to see that!!!!!_ she texts back. _you okay?_

_i’m great. Harry gave me st. john’s wort and half an oxy_

_is that medically advisable??_ Mia replies.

_i have no idea but i feel pretty good. im omw to the shrink_

_oh great you’re actually doing that? Now dad’s going to use that against me like “your brother’s going so why can’t you go”_

_sorry babaaaaaaay! i want to complain to somedody about shit_

_you have me for that :/_

_yeah but you are not a doctor???_ Amir writes back. _you are a business major???????_

_Lmao fuck off_

His on-and-off therapist is named Jodie. She’s blonde and sunny, with a small office full of cheery sunflower paintings and little embroidered pillows. She asks him how he’s been, and sounds very impressed by his fellowship and his graduation from Juilliard. Amir twists his hands in his lap a lot before he admits that he eloped with Evan five days ago.

“Wow,” she says. “Big news.”

“Yeah.”

“How are you feeling about that?”

Amir, loopy and more open than usual from the shit Harry gave him, shrugs. “I’m glad I did it,” he says. “I know what I want, at least when it comes to that. But I feel like maybe Evan doesn’t.”

“What makes you say that?” Jodie says, writing a note.

“He’s letting his family stuff get in the way of us,” Amir mutters, examining his nails. His eyes feel hot and prickly. “I don’t really want to talk about that, though.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“I dunno. I barely know why I’m here. I think my parents are just afraid I’m bipolar like my dad. They probably think I only got married ‘cos I’m bipolar and crazy and manic, or whatever.”

Jodie nods. “He has bipolar two, right?”

“Yeah.” Amir looks down again, picking at his cuticles. “I dunno. I feel like _something’s_ wrong with me, even if it’s not that.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I’ve always been, like…” He trails off. “I want these, like, giant highs, and I work my ass off to get them, and then I crash down again. Like I want… I want to win a Grammy, but what if I do? Then that’s the best thing that ever happened to me, and my life is just kind of downhill from there.”

Jodie writes, continuing to nod.

“I don’t know if my career is even the right thing to chase,” Amir says, aching. “It’s what I want more than anything, I’m like, obsessed with it, but I feel sometimes like it’s not even the right type of validation for me. Kinda what I really want, deep down, is just, like, to feel safe.”

“Do you think that’s why you wanted to get married?”

“I guess.” Tears prickle at Amir’s eyes, and he sniffs. “I had an abortion a while back. It was Evan’s baby. My husband’s,” he says, then laughs at how unreal that sounds. “And I dunno why, but I keep thinking about it, these last couple days. The baby’d be turning two soon. I just keep thinking about that for some reason.”

Jodie glances up at him. “Do you wish you’d had the baby?”

Amir shakes his head. “No. But, uh.” He clears his throat. “I dunno. It would’ve been the wrong decision to keep it, I know. But I just… it would be nice to have a little kid who loved me, and needed me, right now. I just want someone to love me completely, I want to be someone’s whole world.”

“Do you feel like you don’t have that with your husband?”

“I’m not his whole world,” Amir whispers, crying now. “You can’t be anyone’s whole world, unless they’re fucking pathetic. He’s his own person. I’m just selfish, and I don’t want him to be. But I _do_ want him to be, ‘cos I wouldn’t respect him if he wasn’t, and I wouldn’t love him if I didn’t respect him. He said that, and he’s right.”

“What about that hurts you?” Jodie says. “Why do you think his world not revolving around you bothers you so much?”

Amir shakes his head, wiping his tears. His head feels airy and light, and the rest of him feels heavy in comparison. He swipes his sleeve over his wet cheeks, and more words trip out: “I dunno. I dunno. I just want more. And now my stepdad is like, trying to make me into a star, like, the kind of star he is.”

“Do you want that?”

“I do,” Amir admits. “But it also seems kind of empty.”

“Does your stepdad seem empty to you?” Jodie says.

“No,” Amir says, shaking his head and sniffling. “I dunno, though. Everyone’s so selfish about them — my dads, and my stepdads. I see how their fans are with them, they just project their own shit on them.”

“You don’t think there’s a meaningful connection there?”

He shrugs. “I feel a connection when I play to an audience,” he says. “I get this crazy high from that, when it goes well. But after… I get this empty feeling. When people from the audience want to come talk to me, I just feel empty.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“They don’t know me,” Amir says, another tear rolling down his cheek. “When I get that high, I feel like they all know me. It’s this crazy, like, metaphysical, larger than life thing. And then when I talk to them after, I realize it wasn’t real, it was just a feeling. It’s such a let-down.”

Jodie finally reaches for a box of Kleenex and hands it to him. He grabs it from her and blows his nose. She waits for him to finish.

“I get the impression that you want to be respected and understood,” she says, “specifically by people you also have respect for.”

Amir sniffles, clutching the used tissues in a ball in his fist. “Yeah. ‘Cept my dad is kind of like me in that way, too. Zayn, I mean. He wants to be respected.”

“And you identify a lot with him, right?”

“Yeah.” He pulls more tissues out of the box. “Do _you_ think I’m bipolar?”

“We’ve talked about this before, Amir — I don’t want to make a diagnosis just based off our sessions. You’ll have to get a physical as a baseline first, and then I’d refer you to a psychiatrist who specializes in mood disorders.”

“But you know what it looks like.”

“I mean, you know the symptoms of a manic episode as well. Do you personally think you’ve ever experienced that?”

“Remind me what are they?” Amir asks, his voice hoarse.

“Things like excessive spending, sexual promiscuity,” Jodie says. “Not feeling like you need to sleep, being really abnormally chatty, thinking you’re great and have all of these great ideas, being irritable and impatient with people. A really consistently elevated mood like that, for a week…”

“…to a few weeks at a time,” Amir recites along with her. “I dunno if I’ve ever had a bunch of those at once. All of them individually, I guess. Sometimes I don’t sleep much... I got married kind of randomly.”

“Not so randomly. You’ve been together for a long time, and according to my notes, you’d discussed marriage with him before?”

“I guess,” Amir admits. “But I’m kind of slutty, and also really bad with money.”

Jodie chuckles at this. “Why don’t we just continue to keep an eye on things?” she says. “If you do find yourself feeling a bunch of things at the same time, you can always give me a call and come see me, or I can give you a referral if you’re not in town. Does that sound okay?”

His eyes prickle with tears again. “Okay,” he says, nodding.

“There’s one condition I was reading about recently, and it might be a better fit than bipolar would be,” she adds, then gives him a stern look. “If I give you the name of the disorder, I don’t want you going online and reading about it excessively, and assuming you have it — I’d want you to just keep it in the back of your head and consider formal testing. But it’s relatively rare. A genetic history of bipolar disorder is a risk factor, though.”

“Okay,” Amir says, his head swimming and eyes burning. He feels sleepy from crying. “What is it?”

“It’s called cyclothymia.”

“Cyclothymia,” he repeats.

“Yes.” Jodie pushes her glasses up on her nose. “It’s like bipolar disorder, but less intense, with much more lability.”

“Lability?”

“More frequent mood swings.”

“Yooooo!”

She laughs. “Please, let’s find out more before we assume that’s what you have, okay?”

“Okay, okay.”

“Can I refer you for testing, or are you still hesitant about that?”

“Um.” Amir rubs at his eye with a knuckle. “Can I do it, like, after my honeymoon? Is that cool?”

“Of course. By the way, before I forget, I have a movie recommendation for you,” Jodie says. “ _That Thing You Do._ Ever seen it?”

“No, never heard of it.”

“You’ll like it. Trust me. You might even get a little perspective out of it.”

*

When Amir leaves, he actually does what he’s told for once. He doesn’t look up cyclothymia, and he doesn’t look at his social media, and so what if pulling this off requires him deleting almost all of the apps off his phone and watch besides the calculator one so he can’t actually get on the Internet? It still counts.

He’s sitting on the kitchen balcony back at the house, listening through the screen door to the comforting sounds of Zayn making dinner, when Evan calls.

“Hey,” he says dully, shifting his earpiece.

“Hey,” Evan says. “So… everyone’s okay?”

“Yeah. Everyone’s okay.”

“Alright, good.”

“I caught a big chunk of glass in my arm,” Amir says, wielding this like a weapon, wanting to force sympathy from Evan. “Chandelier fell.”

“Oh, babe. Jesus. But you’re alright?”

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

“Listen, I wanted to tell you, I’m gonna come back. I’ll fly out to Sacramento whatever day you are.”

Amir is silent for a moment, still pissed off but greatly relieved at the same time. “You sure?”

“Of course. I want to see you. Sorry I was a dick before.”

Amir plays with his hoodie strings. “I was a dick too,” he mutters. “Sorry.”

Evan laughs. “It’s fine.”

“I don’t think you’re a puppet, or a toddler.”

“Uh, yeah, that was a little harsh.”

He winces. “Sorry. I know. You’ve worked your ass off to not be those.”

“Yeah, I have.”

“I’m just in a weird mood, I dunno.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Everything just seems like too much, right now. Like I can’t… I dunno, I can’t get my head around it, so everyone wants to just handle it for me, but if I let them do that, they’re gonna, like… I dunno, I’m scared I’ll get sucked into Harry world.”

“What’s Harry world?” Evan sounds like he’s walking. Maybe on the beach. He likes to walk on the beach.

“The world where everyone wants to fuck you, and be nice to you, and use you to make them money, and you’re like, a wholeass brand unto yourself.”

Amir hears Zayn laugh at this from the kitchen.

“Stop eavesdropping on me,” he yells through the screen door.

“Talk quieter then,” Zayn hollers back.

“I dunno,” Evan says. “It sounds like from what you said in London that you don’t want to be in Harry world? So just, y’know, don’t let yourself get distracted. Remember what you actually want to do, and go toward that, even if people are trying to manipulate you. That’s what I’ve had to do. And I get how family can be a mindfuck when it comes to that, I really do. I’m in the middle of the mindfuck right now.”

Amir suddenly misses Evan so badly that it feels like his chest is caving in. “I miss you, man,” he says. “I wish you were here.”

“Me too. I’ll be there soon.”

“I wanna be a good husband, you know? I want to support you and shit. I wanna be with you right now.”

“I want you with me, I swear. I do. I want to meet back up as soon as we can.”

“I’m flying up with my dad Thursday afternoon, so if you wanna meet me...”

“Yeah. Sure. I’ll get a ticket.”

“Are you gonna leave without even saying anything to your dad?”

“Dude, fuck my dad,” Evan says, and Amir laughs. “I’m here for my sister, and my mom. That’s it. And things calmed down a little this afternoon, so, y’know.”

“Good.”

“I slept in the backyard last night,” Evan says, sort of randomly.

“Really? Like in a tent?”

“Nah, just in the grass. I couldn’t sleep, I was getting that claustrophobia thing, so I just, like, went outside and lay down and went to sleep there. It was warm out.”

Amir pictures Evan sleeping in the grass, under the stars. “Why, though?”

“I dunno. House is full of people, stress… it’s too much.” He inhales. “I miss you too. Everything’s been so weird since I flew out. I think I just wanna be with you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, man. Shit doesn’t feel real without you.”

This is too much, it’s making Amir’s chest hurt, so he says, “Hey, you wanna see a pic of my arm with the glass in?”

“What?” Evan exclaims, sounding scandalized. “No!”

“You’re sure? It’s gnarly. You’re not curious?”

“Ugh. Not really… but okay, maybe…”

Amir taps at his watch, sending the photo off to him. A moment later, Evan cries, “Jesus,” in his ear.

“Who’s the pussy now, huh? Who’s the squid?” He decides to leave out the part about him fainting. Nobody needs to know about that.

“Not you,” Evan says. “Officially promoted from squid. I’m gonna barf. You sure you’re fine?”

Amir rolls his sleeve up and glances at the gauze, which has a dried blood stain on the side of it, but doesn’t appear to be soaking up any new blood. “I’m good.”

“The girls okay?”

“They’re fine. Thanks for asking.”

“Yeah, sure. They’re my sisters-in-law, right?”

Amir laughs with surprise at the idea of his eleven and twelve-year-old sisters having a brother-in-law. “Shit, I guess they are.”

When he’s hung up with Evan and gone inside, Amir can hear Harry down the hall in the living room, talking to someone on the phone. He sidles up next to Zayn at the stove and peers into the cast-iron skillet.

“What’re you making?” he says.

Zayn wraps a careful arm around his shoulder — Amir has bruises blossoming over his neck and back. “Rice and some vegetables.”

“Wow, Dad, I can’t remember the last time we had rice and some vegetables. I don’t think you’ve ever made rice and some vegetables.”

Zayn snorts. “You can have some air for dinner if you like.”

“I’m just fucking with you, you know that.”

“Y’know, leave it to your father to keep nothin’ but brown sauce in his fridge. This was all I thought to grab from our place, we’ll have to get takeaway tomorrow if the cleanup’s not finished by then.”

“You did fine. It smells good.”

“Good. Now go lie down on the couch and relax. Probably lost ‘round forty IQ points havin’ all that shit bounce off your head… now you’re just as dumb as the rest of us.”

“I think I’d still come out about ten points ahead,” Amir says.

Zayn laughs and flicks him in the ear.

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you think I should take a record deal? Like, soon? Or is it okay to wait?”

“You kidding? Wait as long as you want,” Zayn says, patting him on the back and then returning to stirring the rice. “I don’t give a fuck.”

“What about what Harry says?”

“Don’t worry about Harry, alright? I know he’s all wound up over this, but honestly… don’t let him rush you.”

Relieved, Amir murmurs, “Okay.”

“Just be a regular kid for as long as you can,” Zayn says. “Be twenty-two. It’s fine.”

“Are you saying that ‘cos of everything that happened in Vegas? ‘Cos I got married and stuff?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Just, I dunno… a year ago, I feel like you’d’ve been all for me signing a deal. Especially with good offers on the table.”

“Not necessarily. More than anythin’ what I want is you kids happy and as normal as possible. Yeah, I think you’re dead talented, but you’ve got time. The perspective we all come at it from… y’know. It’s a bit twisted.”

“Yeah, you’ve said.”

“Your emotional wellbeing, that’s more important than anything.”

Amir eyes him. “D’you think I’m crazy?”

“No, no. Not at all.” Zayn nudges him. “You wanna try this? Make sure it’s edible?”

“Sure,” Amir says, and pulls open the drawer to grab a fork. He scoops some into his mouth, thinks about it, then says, “Put a little more vinegar.”

Zayn obliges.

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you,” Amir says tentatively.

Zayn slings an arm around his shoulders again and leans in to kiss him roughly on the head. “I love you too. Now go lie down, I’ll bring you dinner.”

Amir does go lie down, but not in the living room; he’s wary of Harry right now, like he’ll start asking Amir about work stuff if he sees him, and all Amir wants to do is smoke weed and eat dinner.

He goes in his room and digs his dab pen out of his backpack, takes three big hits, then heads down the hall into the room Toni and Marlena are sharing. They have the balcony door open, with purple sunset light pouring in, and one of those lofi hip-hop beats to study to playlists playing over the speakers. Marlena is lying in the bed texting while Toni sits on the carpet, finger-plucking her guitar.

“Hi,” Toni says when she sees him in the doorway. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Amir says. “Why, I don’t look okay?”

She shrugs. “Just tired.”

“I am tired.” He goes and lies on the bed next to Marlena, shoving her over a little so he has more room. She squeaks in offense and keeps texting. “That sounds good.”

“What?” Toni says, pausing her playing and turning to him, flipping her braids back. “Me?”

“Yeah, you.”

Toni smiles. “I learned a few more chords.”

“Minors?”

“Yeah.” She strums the guitar. “I like how sad those sound.”

Amir nods. “Me too.”

He closes his eyes, then. The weed is starting to hit him, mixing with the exhaustion and the oxy and making him melt into the bed.

“Is your arm okay?” Marlena says to him.

“Yeah, it’s fine.”

“Dad said you might need stitches.”

Dad must be Harry; they still call Zayn Daddy or baba most of the time. The girls love Harry completely, and he spoils them, but they seem a little less at ease with him, which doesn’t surprise Amir. He can see Harry being intimidating as a dad — he’s intimidating enough as a stepdad. Plus, Zayn was always around so much more when they were little.

“Nah, I’m good,” Amir says. “It stopped bleeding.”

Toni pops up from the carpet, abandoning her guitar and squishing onto the bed next to them. “Hey. Are you gonna be famous?”

“No,” Amir murmurs. “I dunno. Why?”

“Dad thinks you’re gonna be famous.”

“Does he?”

“Yeah,” Marlena says. “He was telling us the other day, like, that we should look up to you, ‘cos you worked hard and now you’re _going places._ ” She spreads her hands to emphasize this.

“You don’t have to look up to me,” he says lazily, pulling his hood up over his head and tightening the drawstrings.

“Do you want to be famous?” Toni says.

“I dunno.”

“Dad and Daddy were fighting about that this morning.” She nudges him. “That’s why they took the boat out, was so they could make up.”

Amir doesn’t want to hear this; it’s harshing his high. “Really?”

“Yeah. Baba was saying that he thinks that it’s too much for you right now, I dunno what he meant by ‘it’. And he said he wants Dad to relax and back off.”

Amir thinks of what Zayn just said in the kitchen, and closes his eyes. He feels warm and cozy, and comforted by having his sisters nearby. He could fall asleep right here.

“What did Dad say back?” Marlena whispers, as if she’s noticed Amir dozing off.

“I didn’t hear,” Toni whispers back. “He was being quieter. But he didn’t sound mad, he just talked for a while, and then they came in the kitchen and told me they were going out on the boat together.”

“Weird.”

“Yeah. Is Amir asleep?”

“I think so,” Marlena says.

Amir wants to say that he’s not, but he almost is. “Sorry I made your parents fight,” he slurs.

“Um, you didn’t _make_ them fight,” Toni says, sounding confused. He feels her sit up next to him, and then she pulls his hood back off of his face and starts messing with his hair.

“ _Bahan_... what’re you dooooing...” She knows he doesn’t like his hair messed with.

“Braiding your fringe.”

Amir is too drowsy to argue with this. He feels Marlena sit up, too, and then her petting his head gently like he’s a dog. They must want to take care of him, right now.

LOS ANGELES, AUGUST 18, 2039

Louis gets into LAX around ten and takes Amir for coffee; their meeting with Jeff is at noon, and they promised to meet Harry over there ten ‘til.

At Starbucks, they sit in a little booth and sip their lattes. The day is incroguently sunny; Amir is nervous and unsettled, like he’s standing on the precipice of something, and he thinks the weather should be bad to reflect this.

“I feel like it should be raining,” he says aloud to Louis.

Louis drums his fingers on the table. He looks distracted, and like he wants to smoke. “Raining up north,” he says.

“Yeah?”

He nods. “Raining when I left. You growin’ a beard?”

Amir touches his own cheek. “Not on purpose. Just haven’t shaved in a few days.”

“Forgot?”

“I guess, yeah. Lot on my mind.”

Louis smiles. “Me too.”

Amir studies him. “You nervous?”

Louis blows out a breath. “Nah, no. Just a bit, y’know... feel like Wayne Rooney in D.C.”

“Who?”

“Wayne Rooney! Football?”

“I’m not Mia,” Amir reminds him.

“Sorry.” He gestures at nothing in particular. “I mean I’m just not sure what I’m walking into.”

“Harry hasn’t said anything?”

“Harry is the vaguest person on earth,” Louis says. “Even if he had said anything, I doubt it’d’ve shed much light.”

Amir slides the cardboard sleeve up and down his latte cup. “Dad?”

“Yeah love?”

“I want to keep you as my manager,” he says. “No matter what, okay?”

Louis looks up at him and smiles. “You don’t have to decide that now,” he demurs.

“No, I mean it. I promise. I don’t want anyone else.”

“Oh, Amir.”

“Someone else wouldn’t care about me,” Amir says.

Louis reaches across the table and grabs his hand, squeezing it. “Hear him out, alright?” he says. “I’m just here to advise. The decision’s yours, in the end.”

“I know.”

“Sorry for what you overheard with me and Harry, the other day,” Louis says, looking a little ashamed, flicking his twinkling eyes away from Amir’s face and staring into the distance behind him. “I don’t want that to impact your decisions.”

“I mean, you didn’t know I was listening, though.”

“Honestly, I don’t think I cared if you were or not.” Louis takes another sip of his drink. “Sort of forgot you were even in the house.”

“Thanks!”

“Oh, y’know wot I mean. But I want you to know, that was all old crap between me and him. I won’t feel betrayed if you go with Jeff, I just want you to choose what’s best for you.”

“Don’t you know what’s best for me, though?” Amir says.

Louis smiles at him. “I like to think so, but I’m only human.”

“But you’re my dad, you love me.”

“Amir… sweetheart… someday you might have to learn to trust a couple people who haven’t loved you your whole life.”

Amir laughs. “Only when I _have_ to.”

“Well, alright.”

*

Harry is still talking to Jeff when they get there, so they end up waiting ten minutes past noon in the anteroom outside his office, which is more nondescript than Amir expected. There is a bowl of fruit on the table, though, and a trickling small water feature next to his secretary’s desk.

Finally the door opens and Harry comes out, looking a little frazzled. “Hi. Sorry. We’re ready.”

“What were you on about?” Louis says.

Harry makes a noncommittal noise and shrugs. “Stuff.”

“Oh, good. Glad you got _stuff_ out of the way.”

Amir laughs, then gets shakily to his feet. He’s more nervous than he expected to be.

Louis takes him by the shoulders and guides him inside, where the blazing Los Angeles sun is slanting through the windows and hitting Jeff from behind where he sits at his desk. It makes him look distinctly evil.

Harry hits a button on the wall beside the desk that shutters Jeff’s blinds, like he’s noticing this effect as well.

Jeff greets Amir and Louis with warm hellos and handshakes, gesturing for them to sit on one of his couches. He sits on the one opposite them, and Harry is about to perch beside Louis and Amir until Louis aims a funny look and jerk of the head in his general direction. Harry quickly pops back up and goes over to sit beside Jeff. They remain at odd, stiff angles to each other, their body language tense.

“So,” Jeff says. He eyes the wedding band on Amir’s finger, then flicks his gaze away from it. “Louis, I’m sure you’re somewhat aware of what’s been going on, as far as internal label chatter about Amir.”

“Why don’t you tell me what you know, and then we can compare notes,” Louis says, blasé as can be.

Harry’s body language becomes even more awkward. He keeps moving his legs around, like there are suddenly too many of them, or something.

“Well,” Jeff says, laughing. He picks up a transparent tablet lying beside him and flicks it into dark mode, then hands it over to them. “Just to get an idea of where we’re at, I had one of my guys compile summarizations of the offers in the works that Full Stop has sniffed out so far via our friends at various labels. They’re likely the final deals that each of these labels stands prepared to offer your son at the end of negotiations. The first one is from Atlantic, and it’s by far the best… swipe to the right to see the ones that are a little less strong.”

Louis takes the tablet and starts flicking through a series of .pdfs. Amir peers over his shoulder, but he doesn’t quite understand what he’s looking at.

“No one’s had the balls to approach Amir yet, because no one wants to fire the first shot,” Jeff says. “And they’re aware he’s wrapped in a pretty impenetrable bubble of institutional knowledge and clout. They know they’re going to have to come to the table with a kickass offer if they want to lock him in and sidestep an outright bidding war.”

“Atlantic’s willing to come down to eighteen percent?” Louis says, sounding amazed.

“Yeah, that threw me,” Harry says with a laugh. “It’d be a 360 deal, of course.”

“Right, well, I didn’t think we’d wiggle our way out of that one. Those are here to stay, I think.”

“What’s so bad about a 360?” Amir whispers to Louis. “I thought that just meant they take a cut of everything I do.”

“Well, you’d have to tour, if you took one,” Louis says. “And soon. They’d demand it. Touring is essentially the only way we all make money anymore.”

“Not essentially,” Jeff says. “It _is_ the only way. And no label is going to waste the charisma of a talented performer by not making him, you know, perform. Do you not want to tour, Amir? Not even as an opener?”

Amir fumbles for an answer. Louis puts a hand on his shoulder and says, “He’s weighing his options.”

Jeff nods. Harry continues to look like a Thoroughbred that someone stuffed into slacks and a dress shirt, like he might explode with nervous energy at any moment, knocking the platinum records off of Jeff’s walls and the awards off his desk.

“This projection from Interscope?” Louis says, tapping the tablet. “This is honestly insulting.”

“Interscope actually wasn’t there,” Harry says. “They only heard about him secondhand.”

“Well, that’s a good sign,” Louis murmurs.

“What,” Amir says, “that the label that wasn’t there thinks I’m not shit?”

Louis laughs. “Right. And this is actually a fairly standard offer for a relative unknown. If you were the average artist, if you weren’t my son, I’d be advising you to take something like that.”

“Is there anything from Blue Note?” Amir says in desperation. “Or Okeh Records?”

“No, love,” Louis murmurs.

“Okeh?” Jeff says.

“It’s a Columbia imprint,” Louis says. “Jazz label.”

Jeff‘s brow knits. “Why are we looking for imprints? We have Columbia _itself_ , there,” he says, and laughs.

Louis fixes him with a look. “We can see that, mate. He’s concerned with the implications for how he’s bein’ seen as an artist, not the amount of money on the table.”

Jeff puts his hands up in detente. Harry glances over at him, chewing the inside of his cheek, his arms folded across his chest.

“So,” Jeff says to Amir. “What do you think?”

Amir, confused, looks between him and Louis. Silence descends.

“What do I think?” he repeats.

“You’re being pitched,” Louis says quietly. “Jeff would like you to come be managed by Full Stop. These offers are projections of offers he thinks they could secure for you, after they negotiate with the labels on your behalf.”

Amir feels duped, and he hates feeling duped. “I thought we were just talking, here,” he says.

“Time is money,” Louis says. “No one in this business gives you time unless they think you can make them money.”

Jeff is smiling tightly, without teeth.

Amir suddenly feels acutely aware of the fact that by the time they were his age, Louis and Harry had already had entire careers, had already been dealing with this shit for years. “What, so you couldn’t get me these deals?” he says to Louis. “These are all, like, fake numbers?”

“They aren’t fake,” Louis says. “They’re sort of like… the ceiling. They’re the maximum investment these labels would be willing to make in you. Jeff’s people could probably get you right up against the ceiling. I couldn’t get you as close.”

“But why?”

Louis shrugs. “Full Stop’s got quite a large dick to swing around in negotiations. I’ve got, y’know… well, bad metaphor.” Everyone laughs. “But, yeah, that’s the short of it.”

“If this is just about money, I don’t care,” Amir says, and rounds on Harry and Jeff. “Seriously, I don’t. I’m not gonna ditch my dad just because of money.”

“There are other considerations,” Louis says.

“Like what? Why can’t anybody just be straight up with me? What are the considerations?”

Louis puts a hand on his knee and clears his throat as if to indicate he’s being rude. Amir doesn’t really care, though.

“Length of contract,” Harry answers. “Ownership of your masters. The kind of music you’re allowed to make. You may think you don’t care about money, but you do care about your artistic integrity. Imagine being handcuffed to a label that treats you like a dancing monkey.”

“My dad wouldn’t let that happen,” he says fiercely. “And wouldn’t Full Stop take, like, ten percent, anyway?”

“Fifteen, but we have some of the best contract lawyers in the world,” Jeff says. “We’d make you back our take in spades.”

Amir is full of nervous energy. He wishes so badly he could get some fresh air, or at least get up and walk around.

The idea of signing a deal right now feels like handing himself over for a prison sentence. Louis is right, he should have had more time to develop himself as a musician, he should be coming at this from a stronger bargaining stance.

“I don’t want to sign right now,” Amir finally says. “I don’t. I appreciate everything you’ve done, Harry, I seriously do, but I wish you’d asked me first, ‘cos I just… I want to take a little time for myself right now. I don’t want to get burned out.”

Harry nods. “I understand.”

Jeff looks like he just watched a big trout wriggle off his hook and swim away. “That’s a risky move,” he says. “It’s true that if it seems like you’re unimpressed by any of the numbers floating around, they might go back to the drawing board and come up with something better. But you also run the risk of someone coming along to steal your share of the market while you wait. Someone else could become the next big thing these guys thought you could be, and then they’ll forget all about you.”

Amir is quiet, but he wants to point out how absurd this is to say, when he doesn’t even know what share of the market he wants.

He knows Jeff has already decided on that for him, though. He wants Amir as a pop star, a vessel for hits.

“I’m not worried about that,” Harry says softly, smiling at Amir. “He’s special.”

They talk for another fifteen minutes or so. Amir agrees to come down to Los Angeles a few times a month to meet with Harry for continued media training, styling, and strategizing — Harry will become his unofficial handler, but Louis will stay his manager for as long as that’s reasonable.

“So,” Jeff says, looking Amir hard in the eye as he shakes his hand. “You’re your dad’s man after all, huh?”

“Aren’t _you_?” Amir says to him.

His eyes widen, and Harry chokes on a laugh. Jeff releases Amir’s hand, then pats him on the arm.

“I’m gonna keep an eye on you,” he says. “I hope to hear good things.”

“Thanks,” Amir says. “I appreciate you bringing me in today. You didn’t have to.”

“My pleasure. A friend of Harry’s is a friend of mine. Good to see you, Louis.”

“You too,” Louis says.

“I’ll let you two keep that,” Jeff says, indicating the tablet in his hand. “Might come in handy. Just for the love of God don’t let it fall into the wrong hands.”

“Ah, thanks, mate. That’s very big of you, sincerely.”

Harry starts to lead them out the door. Louis gives Amir a hard, proud tousle of the hair as they follow him.

In the hall, Amir checks his watch. He has a text from Evan: _you sell out or what?_

 _yep signed a ten album contract_ , Amir replies. _leaving for tour tomorrow. bye forever_

_lol dont fuck with me please im actually scared of that_

_i didnt sign anything b i promise. you on your flight?_

_i am flying the friendly skies as we speak,_ Evan replies.

Harry escorts them to the airy, beautiful lobby, where they stop near the revolving doors.

“Harry?” Louis says. “You have got to the most charismatic awkward weirdo I’ve ever met. What the fuck was going on with you, in there?”

Harry fake laughs, then says, “I think Amir made the right choice, is all.”

Louis squints at him. “You think what, mate?”

Harry flicks his gaze between Amir and Louis. “I had a shift in my thinking the other day,” he says gnomically. “I dunno. I was talking with Zayn, and I just remembered, y’know… I remembered…” He trails off.

“What?” Louis says.

“I just think it’s right for Amir to think on this, that’s all. So I had a bit of a row with Jeff before you got here.”

“Oh, is _that_ why the weirdness?” Louis says.

“Yeah.”

“What, you backed him off?”

Harry nods. “I told him, y’know… if there are things we can take a bit slowly, we ought to. And he thought I was being soft, but I insisted. I think he feels like I gave him blue balls, a bit, sort of teased him and then cockblocked.” He nods to Amir and adds, “‘Scuse me.”

“No worries,” Amir says, delighted. He only occasionally gets to hear Harry being vulgar.

“We never row, but… I thought this was important.”

Louis goes to Harry and wraps his arms around him, pulling him into a hug. Harry looks as surprised as Amir feels. He hangs onto Louis hard, closing his eyes, his mouth a flat line. For a moment they hang like that, not moving.

Louis thumps him on the back twice, then pulls back. “You know he’s hoping Amir’ll change his mind about his management, right? That’s why he’s playing nice?”

Harry smiles, shrugging. “Who knows,” he says. “What if Amir blows up, gets too big for you to handle? You might be glad we kept that door open. Jeff might want to take him on personally, even.”

Louis nods. “We’ll see,” he says gruffly. “Alright, we’re off. Gotta get to the airport.”

“Safe flight,” Harry tells them, bringing Amir in for a brief hug.

Amir hugs him back. “Thanks again for the meeting,” he says.

Harry pats him. “Don’t mention it. That’s what I’m here for.”

He says goodbye to them with a wave, then heads back toward the elevators, his hands in his pockets.

MALIBU, AUGUST 18, 2039

The house is quiet when Harry gets home, save for the noise of the housekeeper vacuuming up the remains of glass shards from the living room rug. He waves at her as he goes by, then heads deeper into the house.

Zayn is in his painting room, sitting next to a giant canvas that he has laid out on the floor. There’s a ladder next to it like he was tossing paint from up above earlier, and music is blasting from the speakers.

The canvas is covered in stark sweeps of red, and Zayn is flicking a brush full of white onto it, speckling it.

“Hi,” Harry says, coming toward him, the plastic canvas crinkling under his feet.

Zayn flicks his watch to turn the music down. “Hi.”

Harry sits down beside him. “I like whatever that is.”

“It’s shit,” Zayn says amiably. “I’m just messin’ about.”

“I don’t care what _you_ think of it, I said I like it.”

Zayn laughs. “Fair enough.”

Harry looks at him for a while, waiting for him to glance up and over. Finally he does, and Harry hits him with a winning smile.

Zayn is a sucker for the winning smile. He leans over to press a kiss to Harry’s mouth, and Harry parts his lips a little, inviting Zayn to tongue him if he wants.

Zayn doesn’t, though; he busies himself with setting his paintbrush down and wiping white flecks off of his hands with a baby oil-soaked washcloth that was laying beside him.

“They’re on their flight,” Harry says. “Louis and Amir.”

Zayn nods. “Amir texted.”

“Right. Good.”

There’s a pause. Zayn keeps wiping his hands.

“So, he’s not gonna take a deal right now,” Harry says. “And he’s not signing on with Full Stop, either.”

Zayn starts rubbing the washcloth more insistently. “Good to know.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s for the best.”

“He’s young,” Harry agrees.

“Not too young to get _married,_ apparently,” Zayn mutters.

Harry reaches out and tugs at his shirt, motioning for him to swivel on his butt so they’re facing each other. He takes the washcloth from him and starts dabbing at the white and red flecks on Zayn’s face and neck.

“He’s gonna be okay,” he says.

“I know he is,” Zayn says, sounding somewhat defensive.

“You know, I don’t regret anything about my life,” Harry says to him. “I don’t regret getting famous at sixteen, I don’t regret anything that came after.”

“I didn’t say you did.”

“I didn’t say you said I did. But, y’know, I was thinking of what you said on the boat… that it hurt me.”

“It did hurt you,” Zayn says, jerking his head away as Harry works at a stubborn fleck on his jaw. “Hurt all of us.”

“Hold still,” Harry says, and brings his other hand up to cup Zayn’s face. “I know. But there are worse ways to be hurt. I consider myself incredibly lucky overall.”

“I just want Amir to have control,” Zayn says. “I always thought, like, oh, ‘e’s pursuing this more unusual branch of music, I thought that would give him control. Smaller audiences, less vicious managers, more integrity, more control over his sound and his look… and now he’s getting the sort of attention I didn’t want him to get.”

“But it’s for a good reason,” Harry says. “He’s got something people want. That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily going to get it. It isn’t like when we were kids, and we had no advocate, ‘cos none of us understood what we were getting into. He has us.”

Zayn sighs, his eyes cast downward, eyelashes fanned to his cheekbone.

“Look, of course I want, y’know, what’s best for him. I told Jeff that, we had a whole row about it... I said he’d have a real problem with me if he pushed the kid too hard.”

“Did you?”

“Yes! And he didn’t push, and Amir walked out without inking anything.”

“He’s not quite like you were, you know,” Zayn says. “He’s not set on his career like you were, he’s not quite so sure what he wants.”

“Well, he’s grown up being raised by a load of cautionary tales,” Harry says, giving him another smile.

“There’s something else,” Zayn says. “I dunno. He’s a good kid, he’s a great kid. I just worry about him standin’ on his own. He’s always grabbing for handrails, it’s like he doesn’t trust himself.”

“That trust comes with time and experience.”

“I hope so.”

“Me and Louis are handling his career for now,” Harry says. “And we don’t agree on anything, so that’s great, ‘cos no decision’s gonna fly unquestioned by the other.”

Zayn finally smiles, which is a relief. “Right.”

“And I know he got married, but, y’know… Evan’s not gonna hurt him, or drag him down, or anything… worst comes to worst, most likely scenario, they’ll grow apart and he’ll be a twenty-something divorcée, which is hip right now.”

“Oh, is it?” Zayn says, his voice sharp. “‘Cos when I was a twenty-somethin’ divorcée, I mostly just felt like shit.”

“Zayn,” Harry says softly. “C’mon, it was a joke.”

“Not a funny one.”

“Well, I’m not very funny,” Harry says, and this time Zayn laughs. “Look, please don’t be angry at me.”

“Not angry at you, love.”

“I just meant he won’t be alone, if he does divorce. It happens every day, he’d have support.”

“It doesn’t happen to my son every day.”

“I know.”

Zayn exhales a hard breath, then picks up a can of white spray paint and aims it at a spot on the bottom left of the canvas, aggressively spraying a big white circle over the red.

“What’s that?” Harry says. “Reverse Japan?”

Zayn laughs softly.

Harry reaches up and swipes at his face one last time, wiping a fleck of paint from the tip of his nose. “The girls are at camp ‘til four, right?”

Zayn nods.

“Let me suck you off,” Harry says. “Lemme take care of you a little. That sound good?”

Zayn continues nodding. “Sounds good,” he says huskily.

“Go lie down, then.”

Zayn staggers to his feet, smiling at him, and ruffles Harry’s hair as he goes by. Harry dips his finger into the open can of white paint, writes an _H_ on the edge of the canvas, then wipes his hand, gets up and follows him into the hall.

Their room is ablaze with hot noon light that shines through all the glass fixtures and tables, lighting up their white duvet so it glows. Zayn collapses back onto the bed and slides toward the middle of it, wriggling out of his jeans. Harry stalks after him like a panther on hands and knees, laser-focused on his dick where it’s hiding in his black Calvin Klein boxer briefs.

He slides those down Zayn’s hips, then runs his fingers up his thighs, tickling him lightly. Zayn, who’s leaning back on his elbows, lets his head fall back and groans.

“You didn’t say you were gonna tease me,” he says.

“Teasing makes it better in the end.”

“I know, but it drives me crazy.”

Harry leans down and starts kissing his cock, licking it and stroking it with both hands. He can feel him getting hard already, so he decides to just go after him fully, taking him almost fully into his mouth and sucking so hard that Zayn makes a strangled sound.

“Jesus,” he exhales.

Harry breaks the suction and grins at him, then thumbs at his tip and licks the sensitive bit of it. Zayn grips the sheets in his fists, his veins standing out on his hands. 

“You’re already hard,” Harry murmurs.

“Hey, ‘m not quite an old man yet… just gray.”

Harry lays down over him, using one hand to cling to his hipbone while he massages his balls and the base of his cock with the other. Zayn makes another soft noise, gripping a handful of Harry’s hair.

He’s told Zayn this before, but he likes to watch him age. There’s something sexy about it. He hates any signs of aging on his own face, keeps blasting it with lasers to keep that at bay, but Zayn’s aging is beautiful to him. He’s only a teensy bit older, but he’s Harry’s beautiful old man that he likes to take care of.

Harry keeps sucking at him eagerly, giving the exact same blowjob that he always does (minus the usual finger or two in Zayn’s arse, because the lube is in the bathroom and he doesn’t want to go get it), but the monotony is kind of beautiful. Just because something is the same all the time doesn’t make it any less special. Harry has the same breakfast every day, and he enjoys it just as much every time. He likes the sunset every day. He likes the ocean every day.

It was a surprise to both him and Zayn that monogamy could be that same sort of pleasure. It was just this relationship that they each needed to be in in order to make that work, because the two of them are still somewhat a mystery to each other — even now. Harry likes that he can still look at Zayn from across the room and not be sure what he’s thinking about. He likes that he was paranoid about Taylor, and he likes that Zayn was paranoid about Jeff. There are still stories to be told in their marriage. They’re not just winding down like old dogs. They’re still freaking each other out and pissing each other off and exciting each other.

When Zayn comes, he heaves a long sigh and releases Harry’s hair. Harry swallows, wipes a few flecks of come off of the comforter, then rolls his neck to stretch the stiff muscles there and joins Zayn in the middle of the bed, snuggling into his arms.

Zayn reaches behind them and grabs a pillow, pulling it down some so they can lay their heads on it. He touches a finger to his lips, and Harry obediently kisses him.

“Now I’m gonna be useless the rest of the afternoon,” he complains. “Just wanna lay here and kiss you.”

“You can lay here and kiss me.”

“Feel like I had shit to do today, though.”

“Do you?” Harry says, shaking his wrist to wake his watch. “Hey Siri, does Zayn’s calendar for today have anything on it?”

“Today’s calendar for Zayn has one item,” his watch replies. “‘Call with Jason at three.’”

“That got cancelled,” Zayn says. “Thank God.”

“Free boy. Free as a bird.”

“When’d you link our calendars?” Zayn says, stroking the back of his head.

“Ages ago.”

“I must’ve forgot.”

“You know I read your emails too, right?”

“Yeah, I know. I don’t give a shit.”

Harry plays idly with Zayn’s chest hair, then runs his finger over his collarbone. “I just like knowing what’s going on.”

“I know,” Zayn says. “I like that you never mention anythin’ you read in ‘em to me.”

Harry laughs. “Interesting.”

“Oh, you know wot I mean. I like that you don’t bug me about shit. It’s nice.”

Harry’s quiet for a moment, continuing to touch him, rubbing his thumb over Zayn’s nipple. “Louis wanted me to bug you,” he murmurs. “About your show.”

Zayn snorts. “‘E was bugging me at dinner. You got a problem with it?”

“It’s art. I’m not gonna tell you what art should be. Obviously it rings true to you, or you wouldn’t be involved, and I support that.”

“It doesn’t ring true to you, though?”

“Not to my experience,” Harry says. “I dunno. I, um…” He sighs, wanting so badly to just say _never mind,_ but he told his therapist he’d work on actually saying things instead of just intellectualizing them in his head and moving on. “The sex bit, really, the band members fucking. I dunno what you and Louis got up to, was what I was gonna say. Maybe that was sort of like what goes on in the show, like sexy and exciting and dangerous. But you and me, it never felt like that.”

“I didn’t write it, love,” Zayn says in a soft voice, stroking his back. “I just gave them some material to work with. They only took the things they felt would work for a show. Two kids ‘aving their first love didn’t work for the show they’re trying to make.”

“Right, I know.”

“Wasn’t really HBO material, you and me,” Zayn says, and starts playing with Harry’s hair. Harry can hear in his voice that he’s smiling. “Us sneaking off places to kiss. Holding hands under blankets... Having little dates on the tour bus.”

“With Lunchables,” Harry murmurs.

“Wiv Lunchables. And Capri-Sun!”

“Right, when we went to America.”

“Fuckin’ love Capri-Suns,” Zayn says. “Was such a pisser when Yas got old enough that she didn’t get ‘em at her soccer games anymore.”

Harry laughs. “See… we should’ve signed the girls up for soccer after all.”

“But then we’d have to stand outside in the freezin’ cold at like eight in the morning on a weekend.”

“Yeah, life takes with one hand and gives with the other.”

SACRAMENTO, AUGUST 18, 2039

Mia meets them at the airport as they’re waiting for Evan’s plane to get in, and she and Louis go for lunch at the Sacramento International Airport Popeyes while they wait for Evan’s plane to get in. (Amir thinks Popeyes is disgusting, so he ditched them to get a wrap at the Freshii’s.) The restaurant has a great view of the runways from their booth, and Louis keeps looking out across the misty tarmac, watching planes land. Mia takes some of his fries each time he glances away.

“You’re a rotten little thief,” he tells her.

Mia grins. “You don’t even like Popeyes that much!”

“It’s not as good as KFC, but it’s still good.”

“Not as good as KFC? Dad.”

“What?” He sips his drink.

“You’re cracked, is what,” Mia says. “‘Not as good as KFC’? KFC is garbage food from the trash.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Louis says, putting a hand up. “I paid how much to send you to UCLA, and this is what they taught you? That KFC is garbage?”

“I had a partial athletic scholarship,” she reminds him, popping a popcorn shrimp in her mouth. “You know what it is? You don’t like spicy, and Cajun food is spicy.”

“I like spicy!”

“You think black pepper is spicy.”

“Well, it can be!”

Mia grins at him.

“Hey,” Louis says to her, scanning her with the eyes of a worried parent. He’s noticed she’s lost a little weight she couldn’t really spare to lose, though he tries not to comment on things like that when it comes to his kids, so he doesn’t give them a complex or anything. But the thinness is joined by dark undereye circles, a bruised mark on her lip from the fight she got in last week, and a general world-weariness. “We haven’t really had time to talk… but you’re doing alright, yeah?”

Mia nods, though she avoids his eyes as she does.

“‘Cos Liam told me you’ve been unhappy with work, an’ things.”

Mia snorts. “Work,” she says, doing air quotes.

“It’s a job, Mims.”

“Right.”

“Professional footballer? C’mon. That’s not a job?”

Mia looks like she wants to say something, but just shakes her head and crumples up her empty fries sleeve.

“By the way, I heard they got annihilated this morning, playing without you,” Louis says.

“It isn’t because I wasn’t there, trust me. It’s because Coach put Dawn in goal and Marissa at wing instead of offensive mid.”

“Alright, look,” Louis says firmly. “I know you’ve had a rough go of it lately, and I know you can’t just, like, snap out of a heartbreak straight away. But I hate seeing you like this. I don’t want you to just give up. That ain’t you at all.”

“I’m not,” Mia says hoarsely. “I’m not.”

“Are you gonna go back to therapy?”

She shrugs, then rubs at one of her eyes with a knuckle. “Maybe.”

“Go,” Louis advises her. “It’ll help. You know it will. You were such a big therapy-head all through uni, what happened to therapy? What happened to Al-Anon?”

“I went back to Al-Anon for a bit after Dad relapsed,” Mia says.

“Yeah, but not therapy.”

“They just can’t fix anything anymore,” she murmurs. “Before it was like, my problems were stuff that they could help me with. It was bad patterns of thinking, and stuff. Now my problem’s my fucking knee. It’s the fact that Aya ditched me. It’s the fact that I can’t find a job without my dad’s help.”

“You’re not alone in any of that. You just need perspective, which a neutral third party could give you. Being an athlete with an injury, getting dumped, havin’ a hard time finding work out of uni, these things happen to people all the time.”

“Letting my little brother maybe make a big mistake,” Mia adds. “When I should have been the one to talk some sense into him.”

Louis smiles at her. “How d’you think _I_ feel? Look, love, it is what it is. He’s happy, he loves Evan, and Evan’s a nice kid.”

“They’re too young.”

“I know they’re too young. You think I don’t know they’re too young? But all we can do now is support him.”

“I know. I think I just need to feel sorry for myself for a while.”

“Feel sorry for yourself in therapy, alright?”

“Alright, I’ll call Monday. You happy?”

“Yes.” Louis pushes his fries packet across the table to her. “Finish these for me, I’m done.”

She smiles at him. “You don’t have to give me your fries.”

“I’m old, I shouldn’t eat fries.”

Both of their watches buzz with a text from Amir. _Evan just got in, I met him at luggage. Come find us when you’re done_

 _No you guys come meet us at popeyes_ , Mia types back.

 _:(((((((((_ Amir says.

Louis laughs. “The fuck does he have against fried chicken, anyway?”

“He says it smells gross,” Mia says. “I dunno. I still think he’s adopted.”

“Ah, yeah, you caught us. We won him at the circus.”

“Finally, you admit it.”

“Should we cut circus boy some slack?”

“Yeah, fine,” Mia acquiesces. “Let’s be the grown-ups.”

They find them on the other end of the airport, waiting apprehensively next to Evan’s large black rolling suitcase. They look so young that it’s somewhat painful for Louis to remember they’re married; they seem so fragile and innocent together, like two little spotted fawns standing on the shoulder of a ten-lane highway.

He greets Evan with a bear hug. This is evidently more affection than Evan was expecting, because he says “Oh, hey!” in surprise when Louis’ arms wrap around him.

“Alright?” Louis says, slapping his back.

“No, yeah, sorry. I just spent a week with my family, they’re not huggers.”

“We’ll sort you out fast,” Louis says, and draws back from him. “My first son-in-law! Christ. Welcome to the party, huh? Not that you weren’t already like family to us.”

Evan smiles, his cheeks and ears getting pink, and Amir looks pleased.

When they round the corner away from baggage claim, toward the escalators, a young blonde woman starts striding toward them. She looks out of place here; she’s too L.A. for Sacramento. Louis doesn’t realize what’s happening until she’s right in their faces with a handheld camera that says TMZ on the side, saying, “Hi, Amir? Can we talk for a sec?”

Louis steps in front of the kids, gently puts a hand on her wrist and brings the camera down and away. Eli, trailing them from about twenty feet back, starts striding over.

“Don’t do this,” he asks her. She stares back at him impassively. “Do this to me, don’t do this to him.”

“I just want to ask him a couple of questions.”

“You’re not going to.”

“Can you let him talk for himself?” she counters.

“No,” Louis says, his voice firm.

Eli appears at his side, then, and starts leading her away, saying, “C’mon, ma’am. Let’s go.”

“He’s gonna have to talk to the press eventually,” she shouts over her shoulder. “Can’t hide behind Dad forever!”

Angered, Louis sarcastically waves at her before he turns around to the kids. Evan and Mia look grimly resigned; Amir looks like he doesn’t know how to feel.

“I could have talked to her,” he says.

“Never talk to TMZ,” Louis says. “Ever. When you’re ready to do an interview, we’ll get you a real one. C’mon... let’s keep moving. If there’s one, there might be more.”

There aren’t any more, though. They make through the airport without incident and take a self-driving Uber back to the house, one of the ones with a glass top and seats lining the edges like a subway car. Rain patters off of it as they leave behind the shining skyline of the city and retreating out into the leafy suburbs, then the more sparse exurbs with their pockets of towering windmills. Eli trails behind in a follow car, his windshield wipers slicing frantically.

“Hey, Louis?” Evan says when they’re about ten minutes from home, glancing up at him. “My parents want to, uh... They want to meet you and Zayn.”

Louis looks across the car at him in confusion. “They’ve met me a dozen times, they know me.”

“Right, but they want to talk to you guys about us getting married, and stuff.”

Mia, who’s lying across a seat with her sneakers resting on a window, laughs. “Your parents want to hang out with Pops? Are they sure?”

Louis doesn’t acknowledge this, but privately thinks she’s right. Zayn would have zero patience for Evan’s stuffy parents and the weirdo formalities of becoming in-laws with them. Besides, if they were to so much as imply to him that Amir isn’t a worthy marriage candidate for Evan, Zayn would hit the roof.

Louis thinks he could get through a weekend with them, but asking Zayn to do the same at the drop of a hat is going to be tough. He’s only met the Stewarts a few times in passing, since Evan’s weekend au pair usually dropped him off or picked him up in Malibu.

“You guys don’t have to come,” Amir says. “I can go alone.”

Louis snaps his attention to his son. “Wait, you’re gonna go see them?”

“Yeah,” Amir says. “Next weekend, I’m gonna fly out to the Hamptons. You can join me, or not.”

“Alright, then yeah, I’m going with you,” Louis says decisively, his protective instincts going off like crazy. “And I’ll rope Zayn in.”

“Dad, you only just got home,” Mia says.

“I can fly back out for a few days. The world won’t come to an end.”

Evan blows out a breath. “Really, Louis, you don’t have to,” he says, his voice slightly deeper than normal like he’s trying to affect authority. “It’s not gonna be fun at all. Especially not with everything else that’s going on.”

Louis laughs. “Don’t worry, I wasn’t under any illusions about the fun level. No, I think I should talk to your folks. No point avoiding it, and we should probably discuss the legal bits now that we’ve had time to go over things with the lawyers. I assume you two plan to stay married.”

“Well, _yeah,”_ Amir exclaims.

“So, we’ll be in each other’s lives, us and them,” Louis says.

“You don’t have to be,” Evan says quickly. “You guys can be my family now. That’s chill. I don’t have to talk to them ever again.”

Louis smiles at him. “You’ve had a long week,” he says. “Let yourself get some distance from that before you make any big decisions. And I’ve always gotten on alright with your mum and dad, I don’t mind a formal sit down.”

“Like in the Godfather,” Mia says, and mimics cocking a shotgun.

“We don’t need your cheek right now,” Louis says to her. She flaps her hand at him.

“I’m not worried about you,” Amir says. “I’m worried about Pops spending ten minutes with them and then walking straight into the ocean.”

Evan laughs at this.

Louis is amused that they essentially had the same thought, but he doesn’t let on. “D’you really think your father doesn’t have practice dealing with rich snots?” he says. “No offense, Evan.”

“None taken.”

“I guess,” Amir allows.

“Well, there you ‘ave it. It’s a date.”

*

There’s absolute chaos when they walk in the door. Liam insists on hugging everyone, including Mia, even though she only left to pick everyone up at the airport two hours ago. Patrick joins Max in running to hug Amir, belying his summer-long insistence that he didn’t miss his older brother at all, and then the twins tackle Evan, chanting, “Brother-in-law! Brother-in-law!” They get so overexcited about this concept that they start downright manhandling him; Evan gamely accepts the violence and allows it to morph into floor wrestling right there in the foyer.

“Quit it, quit it,” Liam shouts, and Evan releases Max from a gentle half nelson. “I told you boys, wrestling outside only! Christ’s sake.”

Evan is grinning as Mia helps him up, though.

“I made a ton of food,” Liam says, slinging an arm around Louis. “Got a whole spread going on, out in the dining room.”

“Payno, we all just ate at the airport,” Louis says, laughing. “Why didn’t you tell me you were cooking?”

“Aren’t I always? That’s fine, though! Graze a bit, have more for dinner. You know how the end of summer is — I’ve got a million vegetables, and what I can’t convince the neighbors to take, I’ve got to cook for us.”

“I actually forgot to eat all day,” Evan says. “So I’m down.”

“I made couscous for you,” Liam says to him. “You like my couscous, yeah?”

“I do,” Evan says, smiling. He looks so tentatively happy about being welcomed into a loud, demonstrative, loving family that Louis could almost cry from looking at him.

Sunday, who had been lurking on the edges of the chaos with Amir, reaches out to squeeze Evan’s shoulder. He turns and sees her, then wraps her up in a hug, and that’s when Louis actually does start to tear up.

Liam glances over at him. “What’s wrong?” he whispers, under the noise of the twins starting to badger Amir with questions about how getting married in Vegas works, and demanding he show them the photo of glass sticking out of his arm, because Mia refused to.

Louis shakes his head and swipes at his nose, sniffling. “Nothin’. Genuinely nothing.”

Liam presses a kiss to his temple, then blows a raspberry on him, making him laugh.

Max comes over to him a moment later, wrapping him up in a big hug. Louis squeezes him back, pleasantly surprised. “What’s up, Fox?”

“Nothing,” Max says cheerfully. “You just looked like you needed a hug.”

Louis squeezes him harder and kisses him on the head, his eyes prickling again. He loves Max so much, and Max is so simple to love. He sometimes gets lost in the shuffle because of how low-maintenance he is, but he never takes that personally. There’s never any resentment from him, just jokes and gentle alacrity.

“Love you, kiddo,” Louis says, then whispers in his ear: “Thank you for being me easy kid.”

Max just laughs.

*

Amir is happier to be back here than he expected to be. He had mostly repressed his homesickness all summer, the way he’d done throughout college, and he thinks of Zayn and Harry’s Malibu house of home, so he was feeling alright before the earthquake displaced them. But if he’s honest with himself, at the end of the day, home is where Mia is. When they were bouncing between homes as a kid, or being sent to England over the summer to bounce between Doncaster and Bradford, the two of them always had each other.

And Evan’s his home now, too. Amir’s as happy to be reunited with Evan as he is to be back on the ranch. He’s glad he was alone when he greeted him at the airport, because that meant there was no one to poke fun at them when Evan dropped his suitcase and ran to Amir, grabbing him and burying his face in his shoulder.

They held onto each other for a long time, definitely longer than was polite considering they were standing next to the luggage carousel. People kept clearing their throats and passive-aggressively bumping past them, but Amir didn’t care.

After the hubbub in the foyer, everyone heads into the dining room, even those of them who already ate. Amir’s hungry, anyway — his wrap sucked. The weather is beautifully crappy, and Liam left the dining room door to the back patio open despite the rain, and the table is piled high with bowls of hot food that smell great.

“Stop it,” Liam says to Goose, who’s sat by the table whining. He snaps his fingers at him. “Go lie down in your bed.”

Goose lies down on the floor and rolls onto his back, whimpering pathetically, his paws dangling in the air.

“Poor Goose,” Max says. “Don’t be mean to him.”

“This dog is a fookin’ con artist,” Louis exclaims, scooping Goose up and placing him gently on his dog bed by the window before taking his usual seat at the head of the table.

“No, he’s sad, Dad,” Patrick says. “Look how sad he is. You should give him some steak.”

Louis laughs. “Stop enabling him!”

Amir pulls Evan along, one hand wrapped around his waist, then guides him to a chair before sitting to his right. He keeps his own right free for Mia; she always sits at his right, and Sunday sits at her right. That’s how they’ve done it since they were little.

They’ve been eating for a few minutes, listening to the rain and some soft dinner music playing over the dining room speakers, when Sunday says to Amir, “So, are you guys gonna have a reception?”

Everyone looks up; Louis, who was cutting a fingerling potato, sets his knife down and does a very bad job of looking like he’s neutral on the subject.

“Might be nice,” Amir says, clearing his throat. He reaches over and lays a hand on Evan’s thigh, stroking his thumb over his jeans and appreciating the hard muscle underneath. He hiked so much in ranger school, his legs are like bags of snakes now. “We could do it here, I guess? In the backyard?”

“Ooh, I’d fancy hosting a wedding here,” Liam says, sipping his beer. “That sounds fun.” He nudges Louis. “Did I tell you I’m gonna start a vineyard? Gonna grow grapes? We could serve my wine at their wedding.”

Louis laughs. “You have any idea how long it takes to turn grapes into wine?”

“Couple months at a minimum, yeah?”

“But you haven’t even grown the grapes yet.”

“I admit my plan’s got some flaws,” Liam says, “but I think you’re being a bit of a downer here, Lou.”

“I’m down for a reception,” Evan offers, and puts his hand over Amir’s.

“You guys could also do it at Dad and Harry’s house,” Mia says. “Then you could have a beach wedding, and more of our high school friends could make it.”

“Ohh, shit,” Amir says. “Idea.”

“I still want to supply the wine, either way,” Liam says. “Even if I’m just buying it.”

“Thanks, Liam,” Amir says.

“Dad, you should make cider,” Patrick says. “I feel like there’s better money in cider, ‘cos it’s harder to fuck it up.”

“Paddy, let’s don’t say _fuck_ at the dinner table, but I agree,” Louis says. “Plus we’ve already got some apple trees on the property.”

Liam’s eyes are big with excitement. “That’s right, we do! Wait, how d’you make cider? Do I still have to buy barrels?”

“There’s like a press involved, or something?” Sunday says. “We went on a field trip to a cider mill once.”

“Oh, shit, I remember that,” Evan says. “And Amir was mad they only let us try the non-alcoholic cider, even though we were like, fourteen.”

“We could’ve had a _sip_ ,” Amir says. “No one’s gonna get drunk off a _sip.”_

“Are my boys gonna help me run my cider business?” Liam says. “Max on sales, Paddy on strategy?”

“Depends, can I drop out of school?” Patrick says with a flash of a smile.

Louis laughs. “What is this, the seventeen hundreds? Gonna let a fourteen year old leave school to apprentice at his dad’s cider business?”

“You think I’d be good at sales?” Max says to Liam.

“Definitely,” Liam says. “You’re very sincere, people respond to that.”

“Why am I not involved in the cider mill, Dad?” Sunday says.

“‘Cos you’re a busy adult, love!” Liam says. “Unlike these two. Why, d’you wanna be on distribution? You can ride your horse around Saccy handing out samples.”

“So, yes to this being the seventeen hundreds,” Mia says, making Sunday laugh.

Amir trails his fork back and forth through his couscous like it’s a zen garden, then clears his throat and squeezes Evan’s thigh. Evan has fallen contentedly quiet, the way he often does when he’s engulfed in Amir’s family chaos. “Yeah, I’d like a wedding reception,” he says. “I’d like, y’know… to do the stuff we missed out on.”

“First dance,” Evan says.

Amir glances at him. “You want a first dance?”

He shrugs. “I just always imagined, like, you get married, you have a first dance.”

“Sure, yeah. I’d like that.”

Louis is smiling at them over his clasped hands.

“What song?” Amir says.

“That Frankie Valli one,” Evan says.

He laughs. “Which one?”

“Uh, the only one I like.”

“Which one is that?”

“The most famous one, man, I don’t know. They play it at like, every wedding.”

“Oh, _Can’t Take My Eyes Off You_ , probably,” Louis says.

“Yeah! That’s it.”

“We had that at our wedding!” Louis gently backhands Liam in the chest. “Didn’t dance to it, though.”

“Didn’t we?” Liam says, lifting his eyebrows.

“No! I looked for you so we could, and you were indisposed.”

“What! Where was I?”

Louis grins. “Doing shots with your boys in the corner! You don’t remember?”

“Get it, Dad,” Max says, while Patrick whoops. “You party animal.”

Liam laughs. “Alright, I remember now. But we made eye contact ‘cross the room! I remember. I didn’t take my eyes off you.” He does the finger eye thing at Louis, who smiles lovingly at him.

Amir watches them, hoping desperately that he and Evan are still like that after almost twenty years. Evan laces his fingers in Amir’s, like he’s thinking the same thing.

“There’s gonna be a lot of live jazz at this wedding, if Amir’s allowed to plan it,” Mia says. “I’m just warning everyone.”

There’s scattered sighing and resigned nodding.

“We know,” Louis says.

“If you would all just _give jazz a chance_ ,” Amir says. “You Philistines.”

“Hey, we love your music, Schroeder,” Liam says, and Louis nods. “You’re great. It’s just the genre as a whole is a bit difficult.”

“When Amir listens to music, it sounds like an instrument tuning that just goes on forever,” Patrick says.

Louis snorts at this and tries to hide that by taking a sip of beer.

“Well, congratulations, you’re all uninvited from my wedding,” Amir says dryly. “We’ll just elope again.”

“That’s fine by me and Sunday, we already saw the show,” Mia says, nudging Sunday, who laughs and says, “They should make t-shirts. Evan and Amir’s West Coast wedding tour.”

Mia laughs too. “One night only, Evan and Amir in residency in Vegas. And then the encore Malibu performance.”

“First you guys wanted me to fly you out first class, now you want me to make wedding merch?” Amir says. “I don’t think you understand how this works. You were supposed to get _me_ a gift.”

“Sunday got you a keychain, and I got you a shot glass,” Mia says, shrugging. “Don’t be greedy.”

“Wait, Amir,” Max says. “Do a regular wedding, ‘cos I want to be a groomsman.”

“Fine, you can be a groomsman, but Paddy’s banned from the wedding party for jazz slander.”

“That’s cool, ‘cos I wanna be the minister, anyway,” Patrick says.

Evan laughs. “That would actually be hilarious, can we do that? Can a kid officiate?”

“We’re doing the whole wedding part over?” Amir says to him. “I thought we were just having a reception.”

“You can do whatever you like,” Louis says. “It’s your party, as they say.”

“I want a do-over on the ceremony,” Evan says, squeezing his hand. “So we can do vows and stuff.”

Amir smiles. “You want to do vows?”

“Well, yeah, I mean, nothing _too_ gross,” Evan says. “I could just do a toast at the reception instead, if you want.”

“No, let’s do a ceremony. Paddy officiating would actually be funny as shit.”

“Yeah it would,” Patrick crows.

“And he really doesn’t even have to be legally a minister, ‘cos you’re already married,” Mia points out.

“Oh my God, it’s perfect,” Patrick says, and then the twins turn to each other, wild-eyed with excitement in the way that they get when they just had the same mischievous thought at the same time.

“No,” Liam says to them, his face stern. “Whatever you two are planning, no. No wedding pranks.”

“We don’t know what you’re talking about,” Max says sweetly, taking a sip of milk. This is a pretty ineffective denial when Patrick is next to him, grinning like tiny Jack Nicholson.

“Well, this already sounds like a mess,” Sunday says. “Can’t wait.”

Liam mimes toasting this.

“Hey Mia,” Max says, sounding like he’s aiming for a change of subject. “We read earlier on Barstool that at your last game, you punched a girl on the other team in the boob?” ( _We_ is Max and Patrick’s favorite pronoun.)

Mia sets her own beer down and spears an asparagus. “She had it coming,” she says.

“She had it _coming_?” Max says, his face lit up with joyful incredulity. “She had it coming to the _boob?_ ”

Mia hides an amused smile.

“Max, that’s not dinner table talk,” Louis says.

“What’s not?” Max says. “Boobs or punching?”

“Either!”

“Sorry.”

“Dad, you should buy Barstool,” Patrick says, biting into a potato. “Apparently they’re going under.”

“Not gonna buy a multi-million dollar media entity, Paddy.”

“But you own the Doncaster paper! And you bought LadBible once.”

“I bought and immediately sold LadBible,” Louis says, laughing.

“Wait, really?” Evan says with interest. “I didn’t know about this.”

Something bumps Amir’s leg under the table. He lifts the tablecloth and peeks under; it’s Goose, giving him big puppy eyes and wagging his tail. Amir sneaks him a piece of chicken.

“Yeah, we made a nice bit of profit off that,” Liam says. “I thought Louis had lost the plot, but it actually wasn’t a bad idea.”

“It was a push present from myself to myself,” Louis says to him with a wicked smile. “Since you cheaped out on me.”

Liam grimaces. “Is that a husband’s job? Buy you a website for frat boys as a baby gift?”

“We _are_ frat boys.”

“Wait, how’d you make a profit?” Patrick says, his dark eyes glimmering with interest. “I wanna know.”

“Paddy, love, that’s also not great dinner table talk,” Louis says.

“Why not? I’m interested.”

“‘Cos talking about money just ain’t all that polite.”

Patrick points at Evan. “But Evan’s family now, so we’re all family here, and money is family business.”

“Yeah, but still.”

“I’m actually curious to hear about this,” Evan says. “If you don’t mind, Louis.”

Patrick winks at Evan. Evan discreetly winks back.

Louis laughs and laces his fingers together. “Alright, if Evan insists. Um... I bought it in a sort of fire sale. They’d just gone bankrupt, and they were putting up all the associated assets up for sale for about a million five. So I went ahead and bought it, and then what I did was, I had me accountant sell off all the assets — the servers, computer chairs, toasters from the break room, all of it, and then I sold the domain name and the brand name and all the copyrights.”

Patrick looks absolutely fascinated, like the ruthless little capitalist that he is.

“You didn’t, like, lay anyone off, did you?” Sunday says.

“Oh, no no no,” Louis assures her. “They’d already laid everyone off, which was unfortunate, ‘cos it would’ve been nice to prevent that. But I just sort of picked over the corpse.”

Liam laughs. “Lovely.”

“Well, it ended up partly paying for that yacht of yours.”

“I’m complicit,” Liam admits.

“That’s pretty much what the Birches want to do to my dad’s company,” Evan says. “But on a way bigger scale, and they do want layoffs.”

Amir’s surprised to hear him bring this up; he hasn’t seemed to want to talk about it at all today.

“Oh, oh, Evan,” Louis says, glancing at Patrick, who’s lit up with interest.

“What?” Evan says.

“Paddy’s gonna ask you a million questions about that, now,” Sunday whispers to him.

“I can ask him questions,” Patrick exclaims. “We’re brothers-in-law! Brother-in-laws? I can ask him any dumb question I want to.”

“Go for it,” Evan says. “Do your worst.”

Patrick launches into a cross examination of Evan — some of his business questions adorably naive, some alarmingly sharp for a kid his age — and around them, mini conversations begin to form over the sound of clinking silverware and passed bowls thunking onto the table. Amir and Mia fill Sunday in on gossip about what Todd, Logan and Gretchen have been up to since high school, while Louis takes it upon himself to fetch more beer and ends up carrying on a shouting conversation with Liam from all the way in the kitchen as he rummages through their massive refrigerator. Liam is distracted by Max, who just got a text from a friend of his and wants to know if he can go hang out with him tonight, and also Goose, who has now started begging from every person at the table.

Outside, the rain continues to patter.


End file.
